JERSEY CITY, NJ – A great new invention coined PAIN, short for Pain Acquiring Instrument Neat-O, is starting to be utilized in ERs across the east coast after a recent FDA approval. Typically when a patient reports pain, the healthcare provider asks, “What is your pain score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst pain you could possibly be in?” Patients many times respond 10, even though a score of 10 is equivalent to being lit on fire or stabbed with knives repeatedly in the thigh.
This frustration among medical staff hearing “10” when patients are texting on their phone, led one ER nurse to take his electrical engineering talents to his garage.
“I devised this contraption so that I could actually verify pain,” inventor Ken Waters told reporters. “It’s easy, you just press this button and put the device on their skin near their pain. Then simultaneously ask them their pain score as you press the button.”
Ken Demonstrated for us. “Vwahla! You are in 2/10 pain.”
He was correct, as this reporter had been bothered by right knee pain for a couple weeks but was keeping it to himself. I had stated zero pain when Waters asked, but the detector called me out and was correct.
Waters said the device can sense electrical impulses in pain fibers and the more frequently they fire, the higher the score. It also inputs audio waves from the verbalized pain score from the patient to sense for what Waters describes are “bull[expletive] sound waves.”
“The device will listen for bull[expletive] theta sound waves emanating from the patient and will correlate the information with the electrical impulses to generate a number,” said Waters.
Emergency Department budgets for narcotics have dropped off almost overnight and because so many ERs have utilized this device, patients are actually getting better. It is well known narcotics rarely help non-cancer chronic pain in the long term and in fact may hurt chronic pain patients by causing opioid-induced hyperalgesia, a condition where opioids can induce an increased sensitivity to any painful stimuli.
“Our satisfaction scores plummeted for a couple months, as people complained that their ‘meal in the ER was terrible and I didn’t even get my pain meds that I came here for!’ Now we see less patients, and the patients we do see are truly in pain, as word has spread not to try and fake out Jersey City ER.”
“I love to see the look on a patient’s face when they tell me they are in 10/10 pain and it comes back a 1!” a nurse told GomerBlog. “It’s like they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar! Thanks for playing.”
