Pain Tolerance and the 1 – 10 Scale

Last night I watched a friend of mine break a stack of bricks with his bare hand. As a trained martial artist he’s no stranger to breaking things with his body. In fact, he’s been putting his hands and feet through wood, ice and concrete since he was a kid. You don’t just show up one day and decide to break a stack of bricks. It takes practice. It takes skill. And it takes something else. If you check out the photo here you’ll see my buddy seven bricks into an eight brick stack.. That’s about the moment that he also broke his hand. You might think that breaking a hand on a stack of bricks would cause someone to groan in pain or cradle their hand gingerly. Not this guy. He broke another brick with the same hand just a few short moments after this photo was taken. And thirty minutes later he shook my hand with his broken hand. (Not a flinch.) I didn’t even know his hand was broken until he let me examine it. (My request, not his.) And that brings me to my point. We frequently gauge peoples pain on our 1-10 scale. When asking the pain scale question, we also need to keep in mind the patients own personal pain tolerance. The 1-10 scale is subjective. It also doesn’t take into account the patient’s personal tolerance for pain. Not everyone feels pain the same. I’ve broken my hand before. I didn’t walk around letting people squeeze it after the fact. A career football or rugby player probably won’t rate pain the sa...
Source: The EMT Spot - Category: Ambulance Crew Authors: Tags: Assessment slider Source Type: blogs