A KICK TO the groin for men is often compared to the pain of childbirth, but according to a ‘fact’ doing the rounds on social media, the pain for men is a whopping 160 times worse.
A Facebook post with 32,000 views claims that kicking the testis produces “9000 del units of pain”, which is equivalent to “breaking 3,200 bones and giving birth to 160 children at once”:
This sounds like a lot for a singular boot to the balls, so we decided to look into the claim a little bit further.
The evidence
Let’s start with the part of the claim that says a kick afflicted on the testicles produces “9000 del units of pain”.
The first issue with this statement is that the “del” is not a recognised unit of pain measurement.
In the 1940s, researchers from Cornell University led by James Hardy attempted to create a measurement for pain intensity called dolorimetry (or ‘dols’). A study published by Hardy in 1948 attempted to evaluate the pain of women in labour using dols.
The study describes the ‘dol’ as “the unit of painfulness” which “has the value of approximately one-tenth the intensity of the maximal pain”.
The methodology used in the study relied on burning the hands of women in labour between contractions.
Researchers then attempted to calibrate the level of pain felt by each woman, asking them to report whether or not the sensation of pain on her hand (which had a dol scale) was more or less intense than that experienced from each stage of her contractions.
The idea was to be able to establish which level of dol corresponded to each stage of childbirth.
It should be noted that the highest point on the dol scale that was reached during Hardy’s studies was 10.5 – meaning a kick to the testicles could not equal 9,000 dols (or ‘dels’, as the Facebook post puts it).
And aside from the ethical issues Hardy’s process raised, the dol never even achieved popular usage as a measure of pain.
As this 2011 article in volume 39 of the journal Anaesthesia and Intensive Care points out, further experiments found that the dol had “little application as a measuring tool” and that one patient “understandably resented the necessity of feeling pain twice”.
Thankfully for its test subjects, the dol fell by the wayside and was supplanted by a variety of pain assessment tools used today in clinical settings.
One of the most common is the Numeric Rating Scale by which patients self-assess their pain.
When using the scale, doctors usually ask patients to rate their pain from 0 (meaning “no pain”) to 10 (meaning “the worst pain imaginable”), according to this 2021 pain study.
Yet even using modern methods like this, pain remains difficult to measure. As this 2018 study explains;
Pain is defined as a subjective experience, which means that it cannot be directly observed by those who are not experiencing it.
The same study notes that clinicians and researchers rely on observations and measures “to assess and infer the pain experienced by other people”.
It explains that these measures don’t factor in the “inherent subjectivity of pain”, and that current frameworks for guiding pain assessment don’t adequately address the problem of individuals experiencing pain differently.
There is still no clinically-accepted and objective unit of pain measurement, and the del – cited in the Facebook post about being kicked in the testes – does not measure pain.
Even if it did, the del scale only goes up to 10.5 – so a kick to the testicles would not measure 9,000 dols.
The claim on Facebook comparing a kick in the testes to childbirth therefore has no basis in fact.
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