Radiolab - Inside "Ouch!"

Pain is a fundamental part of life, and often a very lonely part. Doctors want to understand their patients' pain, and we all want to understand the suffering of our friends, relatives, or spouses. But pinning down another person's hurt is a slippery business.

Duration: 25m
Broadcast on: 27 Aug 2012
Audio Format: other

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Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR. All right, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jada Boomerad. Okay, I'm Robert Koach. You're cheery today. I was cheery. This is Radio Lab. And this is our podcast version. Yes, and today on the podcast, stay in that cheery frame of mind, okay, because we're going to talk about pain today. So here's the quandary. It is really hard to put words to pain, like to describe to somebody. I have this pain in my back and it feels like, ah, like, ah, it really hurt. It's like, it's really difficult to describe to someone in a way that would let them feel it too. It's like one of these classic empathy barriers, right? That's true. But if you could quantify it, measure it. If I could know exactly, numerically, what you're going through, maybe that would help. Maybe we could be better friends. If you could, do you think you could? Is that what we're gonna try? See, our producer Tim Howard over the last few months has encountered three different people who in different ways are trying to measure pain, share it. So we're going to do three episodes of pain calibration. Calibration. A tryptic of pain calibration. Okay. Bring it on. Here's Tim. Well, hi. How are you doing? I got started with all this when I met this guy. Yeah, I'm Justin Schmidt. I'm a research biologist. But he's really a bug guy. I like to try to get into the head of the stinging insect. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and works in this one-story building on a residential street. Right now we're in my laboratory at Southwestern Biological Institute. Could we just take a quick glance around? Yeah. I'd love to just know what it is that we're looking at. Underneath those cabinets are 48 drawers of insect specimens. So these are... Oh, wow. He's got wasps. That's a poica, and it's a nocturnal wasp. That is terrifying. This one here. Different kinds of weird... What is this guy? Hornets. That's actually a flightless grasshopper. It's got a lot of ants. Wow, there's some little furry... Yeah, those are velvet ants. They're huge. If you pick up one of these things and get stung by, it's gonna feel like, "Oh my goodness, that could kill a cow!" Okay, so this all started for Justin back in the 70s when he was a grad student. And I just thought for a lark, I took a seminar course in etymology. We had one etymologist in the whole university. This is a course in bug science? Yeah, this was in Georgia, and he was outside one day in the field, and he was trying to get a sample of... A harvester ant. A harvester ant. What does that look like? They're about a third of an inch long, and they're bright red. Pretty good-sized ants, actually. And he was trying to get one into a jar, and I got stung by one. And I kind of... No, it's odd. It didn't really hurt at first. Okay, it sort of felt like somebody was using a dental syringe, a really fine needle, slowly injecting a little bit of water. It had this kind of crystalline feeling. It wasn't an immediate pain. This was a delayed thing. And so then I thought, "Oh, okay." But after about a minute, it started really hurting. It's like, "Oh, this really hurts." So, it was this really deep sort of visceral pain. Something was going in and tearing out your nerves and your muscles and your tendons. What struck me was how dramatically different this was from anything that I'd experienced from a bumblebee, honeybee, sweatbee, yellow jacket, paper was. And once the pain subsided, he thought, "Man, I need to study that." Yeah. You know, he had all these kind of higher levels science questions about, you know, evolution of pain and insects and how different stinging insects develops. But the problem was, "Oh, okay, pain. What do we do about measuring pain?" If he was really going to get to the bottom of why one insect was more or less painful than another, he couldn't do that with just words like more or less. I need numbers. With numbers, he could do all kinds of research, not to mention it would make working with other bug scientists just a lot easier. And I started looking into this and found out, "Oh, this wasn't anything new. Nobody really knows how to measure pain." Because, you know, no two people feel pain the same way. Some people have hired pain tolerance than others. On the other hand, that harvest grant was objectively way more painful than anything he'd ever been stung by. Oh, yeah. So Justin realized what I need is a universal, insect-sting, pain scale. So, Justin starts traveling all around the world, and he's, you know, every time he hears about a bug, especially a stinging bug, he goes looking for it.

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