When I was asked this in a hospital, for a brief moment I thought about answering like the xkcd. But decided it was better not to
do no harm
Submitted 16 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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Comments
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
Agent641@lemmy.world 51 minutes ago
Japanese radiation guy. All pain pales in comparison to his death.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
There is a board game called Wavelength where you play on teams and try to get your teammates to guess where a randomly placed dial lies on a spectrum. The game is really about guessing what your teammates will think the two extremes are because everyone has different ways of thinking. For example, on a spectrum of cold to hot, you could think of it from like ice to fire or from absolute zero to the Planck temperature. It’s very interesting and I think it’s good to play because it shows that people’s perceptions differ even on pretty basic things.
Nanook@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Definitely a pain induced delirium. Bring on the opiates!
OpenStars@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Perhaps their pain is so far beyond “10” that it literally is 1,987?
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Yeah, and on a scale of 1-10, that integer overflows to 10.
OpenStars@piefed.social 4 hours ago
So in that case is the pain the remainder… or the divisor?
I sense an amount of recursion about to happen here… (since the latter is itself larger than 10)
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
What is the rating scale though? Surely it’s subjective to how the pain feels to you?
RedFrank24@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I would have thought a 10 would be “Kill me, right now. I am in so much pain I would much rather be dead than spend another minute like this” and anything below that depends on where the pain is, like if it’s your arm I would consider a 9 to be “This hurts so much you can get out the hacksaw and chop off my arm because at least then the pain will be gone”.
So… Not so much “How much does it hurt?” as “How far are you willing to go to stop it hurting?”
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
I used to know someone who would regularly rate headaches/migraines as a 10 when I asked them how bad it was, and like, no, it’s clearly not a 10, because you’re standing up talking to me. A 10 is beyond curled up in the fetal position unable to open your eyes through the pain. I get that you are used to these headaches, and can overcome a lot of the pain - but that’s still not a fucking 10, that’s like a 6 or 7 at most. Lying about it means I can’t accurately judge how to help you.
I’ve had tension headaches where I’ve spent hours on the shower floor in the middle of the night and I’d still rate them at most an 8 for the very worst ones where I couldn’t get up
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 hours ago
I was worried I had testicular torsion but didn’t think my pain was high enough for it, but there’s only so many times you can read stuff like “getting it addressed within X hours has Y% chance of saving the testicle” before you came lol. (It was actually a UTI or something.) The doc told me that it’s a 10, “well, more like an 11.”
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
There’s some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)
But in practice you’re going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you’re going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.
LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
The absolute nature of the scale isn’t THAT important, yeah it gives you an idea of how the pain feels, but what’s more important is how the number changes over time.
If a patient keeps saying “IT’S AN 11!!” for an hour and then now it’s a 9? Great, we’re moving in the right direction.
If someone starts out saying it’s an 11 and suddenly it’s a 15? Well, what changed? Did some meds wear off? Did they shift and move something that increased the pain?
Heck, 90% of the time if I get there and it’s an 11, then just 10 minutes later it’s suddenly a 6 cause they’ve calmed down now that help is there.
Nythos@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
I’ve never been able to properly conceptualise converting the pain I’m feeling into a 1-10 scale.
It just doesn’t make sense to me
BanMe@lemmy.world 36 minutes ago
I used to be so honest about this. My lung collapsed, repeatedly and they had to carve up my insides and glue it to my ribcage with scar tissue after having a drain tube sucking out my thorax into a bloodbox for 10 days, so like, I have a threshold for “10” that is a bit higher than other folks, and I tried to explain that (this meme is about me apparently) and generally got zero drugs. Now they ask and I say “10” and they give me drugs. Lesson learned.
chuymatt@startrek.website 14 minutes ago
I’ve broken an arm, neck, and a leg. I’ve had gall stones (actually worse that the others). I had kidney stones and was being constantly asked my pain level and was just on my phone and calmly said ‘seven’ and they didn’t believe me, until they got the CT results of the three 7-9mm stones lodged my ureters. The nurse was confused and I had to explain to the doc on call they needed to remember that things are all relative. Once they saw my BP edging toward stroke level, they brought out the meds.
It is complicated to be honest in medicine, isn’t it.