In her 2005 poetic essay “The Pain Scale,” author Eula Biss challenges the conception of medicalized pain rating systems. She describes how pain ranked at “0” or “10” seems unfathomable, given the impossibility of representing pain’s absolute absence or its “worst imaginable” presence (Biss 30). She also critiques how patients often succumb to the “tyranny…
Tag: pain
Not a Pinch, but a Burn: Validating Pain in Reproductive Health Settings
“I would say it’s just a pinch, but that’s not true. You’ll feel a prick when I insert the needle, and then a burning sensation. It’ll last for about thirty seconds and it will be unpleasant, but then it’ll be over.” I am not used to having my pain acknowledged in clinical settings when it…
Pain is complex. We should treat it that way.
Steve Server// “What sort of pain is it?” Often, when health care providers inquire after patients’ pain, we get a sort of flummoxed look. In response, we sometimes get a confused chuckle. As first year medical students, we are trained to differentiate sorts of pain: crampy vs. electrical/burning; dull vs. sharp; localized vs. radiating. As our medical…
You Will Hear. On the Shareability of Physical and Psychological Suffering in Academia
As a French PhD candidate, I would like to question the shareability of pain in the particular context of academia. Indeed, physical and mental suffering among PhD students is a widely but unofficially admitted fact in the French academic milieu. Consequently, I decided to find out how things stood for my fellow PhD candidates.
Waiting for Laughter, Part 2: Finding Empathy for Pain Through Humor
James Belarde // AUTHOR’S NOTE: Both this article and Part 1 discuss a short play written by the author that can be found in its entirety here. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” -Maya Angelou In my last article, I discussed a comedic (and tragic) play I wrote that was produced by my fellow…
Pain without Cause
Diana Rose Newby // …if the only external sign of the felt-experience of pain (for which there is no alteration in the blood count, no shadow on the X ray, no pattern on the CAT scan) is the patient’s verbal report (however itself inadequate), then to bypass the voice is to bypass the bodily event,…
The Apperception of Pain
Gabi Schaffzin // I’ve been staring at faces lately. Of course, as a grad student in the throes of dissertation writing, that must mean these are not live faces—no one has time for that anymore. No, these are drawn and photographed faces. These faces were all illustrated or captured in an effort to create a…
Painful Memories and Memorable Pain
Gabi Schaffzin // The following contains spoilers for Amazon’s Homecoming series. Proceed with caution. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory. This started after I recently finished bingeing on the Amazon series, Homecoming, a quick but worthwhile watch for the psychological-thriller fan in all of us. Briefly, the show, directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail,…
The Complicated History of the Visual Analog Scale: Part 1
Gabi Schaffzin // A few hours after knee surgery, a nurse or doctor might come into your room and ask how you’re feeling. They might show you a scale of 6 faces like this: Maybe a notched line like this: Or, they might show you this line. It will probably have two phrases on it:…
Towards a Meditation on Pain
How do people talk about and understand lived experiences of pain? For the past year, I have immersed myself in the world of qualitative research into lived experiences of trauma, including in relation to amputation, a large part of which is the experience, management and understanding of pain. Some of this research has been motivated…