Field Notes #25: emoji pain scale, NASA photo of star birth, & guidance to “live the questions”
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Hello! I hope you are having a wonderful week so far. This week’s edition of Field Notes (a collection of health tips, news, and insights I’ve run across recently) includes stardust, a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and a study looking at an emoji pain scale.
1} The making of a star, the making of our bodies
NASA debuted this week the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, dazzling images, like something out of a futuristic novel or movie.
You probably saw this one, an incredible view of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, thousands of galaxies in one photograph:
This one, of the Carina Nebula, is quite magical, too:
NASA calls this a “stellar nursery” — a landscape of stars being born.
The first thing that came to mind was the notion that we are made from stardust, too. Our human bodies came from stars.
True? Yes, says the Natural History Museum in the U.K., quoting Planetary scientist and stardust expert Dr. Ashley King:
“It is totally 100% true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.”
You can look at all the images on NASA’s website and download them, too.
2} Emoji pain scale
You may have had a healthcare professional ask you, at some point, to rate your pain. There are a plethora of pain scales, including numerical scales, ranking your pain from 1 to 10, and pictorial scales, which often present a row of faces, from smiling to an agonized frown with tears. One of the most common pain scales is the Wong-Baker FACES© Pain Rating Scale. It requires a license to use it, but you can view it here.
Some doctors at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital wondered: Why not use emoji?
Emoji are open source, free, easily recognized, and designed for digital devices.
Dr. Shuhan He and colleagues came up with a scale using these six emoji:
😀 🙂 😐 🙁 ☹️ 😭
They tested the scale on 109 patients at the ER or surgical units at Mass General. The patients were 48% female and 83% white with a median age of 65.
About half were asked to rate their pain first on the numeric pain scale, then on the emoji pain scale; the other half were asked to use the pain scales in the reverse order.
The two scales showed a “high level of agreement,” according to the researchers. More testing is needed, especially on more non-white patients, but the researchers thought the emoji scale could be a “low-cost alternative to the numeric rating scale.”
👍👍👍
Read the full research letter in JAMA Network.
3} “Live the questions”
I have an urge sometimes, and maybe you do, too, of wanting to know what is next, how do to it, what fork to take. I think about a question in my mind like a puzzle, which if only I can put through enough permutations, will be cracked like a code.
But life doesn’t work like that. You can’t feed your brain a question and 23 options and expect an instant, correct answer — well, for “what to cook for dinner?” maybe, but not the big questions, the questions that encompass a life well lived.
This passage from poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter he wrote to a 19-year-old, sums up the situation beautifully. I find it has a reassuring effect of repositioning a question from a place of worry and fear to a place of curiosity and anticipation:
“…I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 4
“And the point is, to live everything.”
I hope you have a terrific weekend ahead, living the questions and marveling in our place in this vast, amazing universe. ❓🤨❤️ ✨
To our journeys,
Brianne