A rock critic speaks about pain

[koganbot]

At Denver Health they'll frequently ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being least painful and 10 being most. Usually when I walk into the Occupational Therapy gym at the beginning of my session I tell them "1 or 2" and then as we do work it might rise a little, but once a week my therapist will stretch the arm as far as it'll go in different ways to measure how much rotation I've got back, and this time I said, while holding my breath, "By the way, we're up to 8 or 9 now." Then I paused and said, "Wait, I really should rate that only a 7. As a music critic I've always got to guard against grade inflation" [emphasis added].

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

You also need to save some space in case you ever get a bad kidney stone. When I had that, if they had told me at the hospital, "We can ease the pain in half an hour or so, or kill you now," I would have gone for death with no hesitation. (Fortunately the doctors knocked me out for a few hours, and I was fine when I awoke.) I am told it ranks alongside the worst childbirths as the worst pain there is, which makes me wonder why the fuck any women ever have children.

Hurtfork

[hipsterdetritus.livejournal.com]

As a critic I am glad pain is a largely intangible and relative concept from person to person because otherwise if I gave smashing my thumb with a hammer a 6/10 rating someone would inevitably accuse me of overrating it.

Re: Hurtfork

[koganbot]

Actually, one of my favorite papers I wrote in college argued that - despite what philosophers claim - in standard usage intensity of pain is not strictly personal and ineffable but is a social value judgment that we can and do argue about, just as we argue about beauty, etc. - well, not "just as," since "beauty" is sometimes said to inhere in an inanimate object (despite the eye-of-the-beholder bromide), but we most certainly don't leave it up to an individual's self-report to decide how hurt he's feeling, whether his pain-statements are valid, whether or not he's malingering or whining, etc.