Word: painful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...much pain can a man bear? Nature, says Dr. Hardy, has provided him with a built-in ceiling. On the Hardy-Wolff-Goodell scale, pain is measured in ten degrees of one "dol" each. With their lamp heat, the researchers found that when the skin temperature got to 152° the pain reached its excruciating maximum. After that the pain stayed constant no matter how much heat was turned...
...this reasoning, medieval torturers were wasting their time devising complicated machines to mangle their victims. They could have achieved the maximum of pain with the simplest means...
...important implication." says Dr. Hardy, "is that high-intensity, intractable pain is a physiologic impossibility, and no pain, even at threshold level, can be sustained without remission for long periods of time. So-called intractable pain must therefore be of low intensity, periodic, or must not be truly pain at all, but rather a combination of nonpainful sensations which are interpreted by the individual as unpleasant and unacceptable...
Simple Salt. In the hospital the most frequent and most neglected pain is that of the patient fresh from the operating room, says Baylor University's Dr. Arthur S. Keats. But this pain is by no means universal. He and many other researchers have found that few patients complain of pain after a surprisingly long list of major operations-surgery on the head and neck (including thyroid), hand and wrist, genital organs, or after amputation, skin graft, removal of a breast, stripping of a vein, fracture reduction, nailing of a hip or dressing of a burn. The operations most...
...matter how real the pain, the reaction to it varies vastly with the individual and the circumstances. Boston's Dr. Henry K. Beecher noted in World War II that only one-fourth of the soldiers seriously wounded in battle complained of pain (their wounds meant the end of combat and return to safety); among civilians with comparable wounds produced by surgery, three-fourths complain. When Dr. Keats slipped such patients injections of simple salt solution instead of the narcotic they expected, 43% said that the pain went away. Other patients, told that they were to get "a new drug...