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Comment by mousethatroared | Hacker News Reader

I think the medical community needs to take more seriously that different people have different pain tolerances.

My wife, daughter and I are very pain tolerant. Out of curiosity, I've turned down freezing for fillings and I even turned down some of pain meds before abdominal surgery. I've never taken the post op opioids, including when I had my impacted wisdom teeth removed.

My other kid, on the other hand, is a whimp. She gets anxious simply if I replace her earrings.

My use case for anesthesia is very different from my kid. I struggle to appreciate why anesthesia is even necessary beyond the need to restrain the patient.

My kid could go into a full blown panic attack from pain.

Yet I don't see anesthesiologists ever asking "how good are you with pain?"

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wow I'm envious. I remember how much pimples hurt and I was astounded nobody warned me. This now makes me curious what the low pain tolerance to anxiety correlation is.

That the medical community acts as if you and I should be treated the same is insane to me.

Pain, like sleep, is a super interesting field and specialization, that is somewhat secondary for most medical practitioners.

In physiotherapy, we used to think that structural issues like slipped disks caused pain, but when we started imaging healthy people, we found the same structural issues commonly in the 'healthy' population.

Both how much pain we feel and how sensitive we are to it are things that can be learned. The bullet ant initiation rites of the Sateré-Mawé people are an extreme example.

A decent book on this is 'dopamine nation'.

read some books on parenting

Which ones worked for you?

My checkbook. It told me not to be a parent.

And I taught my bevy of child pickpockets to look for old people with checkbooks.

Thank you for forfeiting the evolution game.

Lol, why?

You were born with innate high pain tolerance, but your daughter is a whimp because she didn’t win genetic lottery like you?

I think they're using it hyperbolically. As a parent (who also maybe has a high pain tolerance but I am a guy and we are famous for both thinking that and for not being pain tolerant) my daughter is currently like this including the earrings thing. It's more of a frustration but I know she will grow out of it as she's already gotten a lot better. I would imagine OP is in the same boat and is just letting off a little rhetorical steam.

"I think they're using it hyperbolically."

You'd think my comment's thesis that folks with lower tolerances should be respected and treated differently would have given the rhetorical device away.

There’s always someone online who will assume the worst interpretation. It’s unfortunate.

Yeah but have you considered they’re slow? Probably had bad parents.

Not slow, culturally inoculated hypersensitivity.

Wimp is a derogatory term with defined meaning. Try to educate yourself and your buddy before commenting something like that.

Or playful.

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