Word: paines
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Want to get out of the hospital quicker? Chew gum. People who undergo abdominal surgery often suffer from post-op ileus, essentially an intestinal shutdown, leading to pain, vomiting and other problems. The sooner the digestive engine gets up and running, the sooner patients can go home. Researchers at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in California found that chewing sugarless gum can help things along, probably by stimulating nerves and hormones associated with eating. No word on whether any flavor works better than others...
...hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic...
...shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm...
...swears allegiance to his cell on a Koran, then eats a piece of paper bearing 24 vows written in Arabic script, washed down with holy water blessed by the village imam. "After you've drunk it you don't feel fear," says Ma-ae. "You can even withstand the pain of torture without confessing...
...about three years ago the Agriculture Department asked experts at the National Academies of Science to weigh in, and their committee agreed that "hunger" should be reserved for cases when persistent food insecurity results in "prolonged, involuntary lack of food," and the result is "discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation." But that pain was not what the USDA was measuring - researchers were not going out and interviewing poor or homeless people about how they felt when they'd gone for a day without eating. What they could quantify was exactly how often people said...