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Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

Probably not exactly the same but I remember trying to describe a type of pain I felt to a doctor in the US. I called it "sour" (which is how it would be described in Chinese) and the doctor laughed saying that didn't mean anything to him. I think it is extremely accurate and descriptive but to him it didn't even register as having meaning.

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I am often baffled by how some people are able to articulate how a specific pain feels or even where exactly the pain is. Describing pain intensity is hard beyond "not very painful" and "very painful". But adding a dimension of pain type is something I struggle with. Sour pain makes as much sense to me as piercing pain, which is to say: no sense at all.

I've been pierced (not for fun or aesthetics) by large nails in an accident, and it felt nothing like the icepick headaches I get, which my doctor tells me are a piercing pain.

Human internal experience is weird as fuck. If it can help diagnostics in any way, I'm all for more precise pain measurements. But I'm sure someone will abuse that research for torture.

I think it's entirely possible that different people experience pain very differently.

If true, that makes it fundamentally impossible to fully communicate about it.

I read an SF story where telepaths were as doctors. They'd enter the patient's mind, feel what they feel, and recognize the symtoms, because they had actually felt how all common conditions feel.

Maybe we can get to something similar with AI and brain scanning one day?

It would be wild if everyone experienced pain differently despite having pretty much identical tools for experiencing it. That would probably open so many cans of worms…

Even without telepathy I think AI will get there. Doctors don't have that much time or access with a patient. Imagine telling ChatGPT what you feel, what your symptoms are, it asks follow up questions, gives some suggestions on changes or over the counter remedies, and comes to a diagnosis.

Once ChatGPT has done that 10 million times, and can learn from or search those records, vague descriptions of symptoms will likely sound pretty similar.

That should work, if the AMA ever allows it.

I'm thinking AI + MRI imaging could figure out a lot.

Much work to do...

It won't. Because the LLM execution is fundamentally nondeterminstic. The patient will describe something that is irrelevant to the diagnosis (because the patient does not know what is relevant), the LLM will latch on to that, and your kidney cancer will be diagnosed as a knee fracture.

I would generally describe a piercing/stabbing pain as very localised and relatively painful, as opposed to something like an aching pain, which is over a larger area and generally less intense. I don't think I really use more descriptors than that when referring to pain

Once asked by a nurse if it's a stabbing pain or an aching pain, I replied that I've never been stabbed so I wouldn't know.

I had a colonoscopy once, and they struggled to get around the bend, so effectively jammed the probe into the walls of my intestines several times.

It's one of the weirdest pain experiences I've had. It was very painful, yet also very distinctly undefined in terms of location, to the point where the pain felt surreal. Like, the fact that I couldn't feel what was hurting made it feel like the pain wasn't real, yet it was clearly very painful.

Isn’t this basically what headaches are? We have no pain receptors in the brain of course, and I was under the impression headaches are largely refereed pain.

If not all of them, it’s certainly a subset, which is just another interesting dimension of your experience.

Some perhaps, but I have a few distinct headaches where I feel the pain fairly localized. Perhaps surrounding tissue feeding that but still...

> icepick headaches I get

Was the term icepick here given to you, or did you describe it yourself this way? That would be a good example of a description of piercing pain.

I think the closest proximity to suan/sour is just sore. I like the suan metaphore, like something marinated/fermnated/drowning/gone slightly off in dull pain. It wierd because "sour" does feel very apt descriptor, English has sharp/stabbing/throbbing/burning/shooting/stinging/tingling/numbing... etc lots of metaphores. But "sour" is just your default sore/ache.

There are clearly different types of pain. I use the french words for high and low pitch to describe two groups of pain, although I never used them.with a doctor because it would be meaningless for ut

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