I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig
Diverticulitis is something that is mentioned quite often in the discussions of common medical issues. Many times it is people confusing diverticulitis with diverticulosis. A quick review: A diverticula is a general name for an out-pouching of a hollow structure within the body. It is most commonly used to discuss out-pouchings related to the colon. Diverticulosis is just the presence of diverticula in the walls of the digestive tract, AKA the colon. Diverticulosis is incredibly common, with most people having it by the age of 75 and just seen incidentally when they get a colonoscopy. Diverticulitis is inflammation of one or more of these diverticula I want to talk just a little bit about diverticulitis because there are a few major confusing things about it. In general, for most people, diverticulitis presents as a left lower abdominal pain that goes on for several days. There is usually some nausea associated with it, s