"The only source of knowledge is experience." Albert Einstein


My mother didn't raise a fool you know.

If you tell me there are fairies at the bottom of your garden, I'm going to remain sceptical.
I need to see that kind of thing for myself.

I never thought I'd like sprouts. I was a sucker and fell for the old, "don't knock it til you've tried it". Thus confirming what I already thought I knew.

I have, on a few occasions, burned myself. Not intentionally, of course, but accidents happen. This has given me a pretty solid understanding of the relationship between heat, touch and pain. Enough of an understanding that I no longer need to touch it to know it.

Pain is a tricky one though. Sure, the root of knowledge may well be in experience, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and take someone's word for it every once in a while. I guess that all depends how intent you are on knowing things for yourself. Some folk are just that bit more die-hard I suppose.

Cue American entomologist Justin O. Schmidt...

The Schmidt Sting Pain Index or the Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index is a scale rating the relative pain caused by different Hymenopteran stings. (Hymenoptera are a large order of insects including bees, wasps and ants.) Bet you can tell where this is going, huh?

His original paper, published in 1984, was an effort to categorise and compare the haemolytic properties (involving the distruction of red blood cells) of insect venom. For this paper, he created an index. Starting at 0 for stings that are completely ineffective against humans, progressed through 2, a familiar pain such as a common bee or wasp sting, and finished at 4 for the most painful stings. In his conclusion, he offered some descriptions of the most painful examples... " Paraponera Clavata stings induced immediate, excruciating pain and numbness to pencil-point pressure, as well as trembling in the form of a totally uncontrollable urge to shake the affected part." Now, that stikes me as a man talking from experience.

Schmidt has since refined his scale, culminating in a paper published in 1990 which classifies the stings of 78 species and 41 genera of Hymenoptera.

Again, Schmidt described some of the experiences in vivid detail:

• 1.0 Sweat Bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire Ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn Acacia Ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced Hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing his cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honet Beeand European Hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red Harvester Ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper Wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
  
• 4.0 Tarantula Hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet Ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

OK....

That static shock from walking across shag carpet and touching the light switch, I get. It's a pretty universal example. I'll even buy being asked to imagine W.C. Fields stubbing his cigar out on my tongue. I haven't experienced it but it's within my imagining. However, I for one have never mashed my hand in a revolving door. But, this could well be the man that has, purely in the name of science.

Anyway, I'm going to take this guy's word for it.

There are issues with this though. For starters, this is the kind of person that describes a Sweat Bee sting as "almost fruity" and a Hornet sting as "slightly crunchy". Not to mention that this is the type of selfless nutcase that gets himself stung so he can tell others how sore it is. I don't want to burst his bubble but I'm still going to try and avoid being stung anyway, no matter what it's by. And if I am stung, the knowledge that this crazy s.o.b. can empathise will provide little comfort. I'll even go out on a limb and admit that Schmidty can probably take more than me. Some folks are just a bit more into pain. I know this. I have cable TV.

Anesthesiologist Henry Knowles Beecher (1904 - 1976), while serving as an Army medical consultant on the Anzio beachhead, observed that soldiers with pretty serious wounds complained of pain much less than his postoperative patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. Beecher hypothesized that the soldier's pain was alleviated by his survival of combat and the knowledge that he could now spend a few weeks or months recovering in safety and relative comfort. The hospital patient, however, had been removed from his home environment and faced an extended period of illness and the fear of possible complications. Beecher argued that "the reaction component" made pain such a complex and individualized phenomenon that it could only be studied effectively in the clinical setting. Patients with real pain would not exhibit the same physiologic manifestations or the same responses to analgesics as experimental subjects, who knew that they were in no serious danger and that the pain would soon cease.

So, I guess Einstein was right. The only definitive source of knowledge is experience.

But can I take his word for it?