Something Doesn't Add Up by Paul Goodwin

Author:Paul Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Pain on the scales

Having a baby can be one of the happiest events in people’s lives, but for some women the pain of labour is about as bad as it gets. They report intense cramps with internal twisting as if someone is trying to pull their organs out, and at least one mother has likened the experience to being run over by a train. Yet, in the 1940s, several women allowed a white-coated scientist to stand over them as they gave birth and, between their contractions, calmly burn their hands and ask them how it felt. The scientists were based at Cornell University and they were seeking to create a measure of pain intensity that they called a ‘dol’, after dolor, the Latin for ‘pain’; they called their pain measurement techniques dolorimetry. Their scale ran from 0 to the maximum pain that can be experienced by a person, 10.5 dols.39

The research team was led by the physicist James D. Hardy, an energetic Texan who was a veteran of the Normandy campaign in the Second World War. The team’s intentions were entirely worthy. If pain could be measured, they reasoned, it would help doctors to assess the effectiveness of analgesics and other pain-reduction treatments. Thirteen women agreed to take part in the study; ‘either curiosity or a desire to be of service caused them to volunteer readily’. However, during labour, when thermal radiation was being administered to their hands to a point beyond where their skin was burned and blistered, a Mrs O. ‘soon began to show hostility to the entire team in spite of expressing many times prior to admission her desire to take part in the study’. A Mrs U. also ‘cried and complained with vigour’ even though her pain measurements ‘indicated only 2 to 4 dols’. The other women apparently cooperated. One participant, a woman who had previously experienced six miscarriages, allowed the team to administer pain of 10.5 dols that caused second-degree burns. The researchers reported that ‘she wished to cooperate fully as an expression of her gratitude in having a term pregnancy and insisted on having the tests made’.

Happily, the women were not required to express their pain level as a number on the 0 to 10.5 scale. Instead, they reported whether the sensation on the back of their hand was more or less intense than the most recent uterine contraction they had experienced. Depending on this report, the burning was either increased or decreased, allowing the scientists to estimate a numeric pain level that was approximately equivalent to that caused by the contraction. Typically, this required three or four burnings, each of three seconds.

Despite the heroics of these women and the medical students who agreed to have their foreheads burned in similar experiments, the methods pioneered by Hardy and his colleagues did not catch on. Other scientists found that they could not reproduce their results. In particular, the type of pain experienced in a controlled scientific setting did not appear to be the same as ‘real’ pain.

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