“It’s painful, and there’s definitely no crossing of wires of pleasure and pain down there,” he says. Getting stung in the nose is a whole-body experience.” You’re sneezing and wheezing and snot is just dribbling out. The most painful sites were the penis shaft (7.3), upper lip (8.7) and nostril (9.0). The pain is there, but then it goes away.” “Getting stung on the top of the skull was like having an egg smashed on your head. The least painful locations were the skull, upper arm, and tip of the middle toe (all averaging 2.3). “All the stings induced pain in the author,” Smith writes. If you are chuckling at the image of a man twisting around in front of a mirror to apply an agitated bee to his butt, I assure you that you are not alone. “Some locations required the use of a mirror and an erect posture during stinging (e.g., buttocks),” he wrote. He kept this up for 38 days, stinging himself three times each on 25 different body parts. He administered five stings a day, always between 9 and 10am, and always starting and ending with “test stings” on his forearm to calibrate the ratings. Pain is very hard to measure, but psychological studies have found that numerical scales do a decent job of putting numbers on an inherently subjective experience. He left the stinger there for a full minute before removing it, and then rated his pain on a scale of 1 to 10. He collected bees by grabbing their wings “haphazardly with forceps” and pressing them against the body part of choice. The author was the only person stung, was aware of all associated risks therein, gave his consent, and is aware that these results will be made public.” The methods do not conflict with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised in 1983. His experimental subject: himself.Īs he writes in his new paper (which, incidentally, is deadpan gold): “Cornell University’s Human Research Protection Program does not have a policy regarding researcher self-experimentation, so this research was not subject to review from their offices. Schmidt recognised that “pain levels from particular stings do, of course, vary and depend on such features as where the sting occurred (…)”, but he didn’t say how these levels vary by body part. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” And the daddy of stinging insects-the bullet ant (4+)-produces “pure, intense, brilliant pain, like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel.” The yellowjacket sting (2) is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent imagine W. ![]() Wine-tasting notes of agony.Īccording to Schmidt’s index, the sweat bee sting (1 on a scale of 0 to 4) feels like “a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm”. Schmidt is the famous creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index-a scale that measures the painfulness of insect stings using wonderful synaesthetic descriptions that almost read like wine-tasting notes. That got him thinking: Where’s the worst place on the body to get stung?Įveryone who works with stinging insects has their own answers, but Smith couldn’t find any hard data. “But I was really surprised that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.” “If you’re wearing shorts and doing bee work, a bee can get up there easily,” he says. In this line of work, stings are a common and inevitable hazard. ![]() ![]() Smith is a graduate student at Cornell University, who studies the behaviour and evolution of honeybees. doi:10.It started when a honeybee flew up Michael Smith’s shorts and stung him in the testicles. Long-term follow-up of children after venom immunotherapy: Low adherence to anaphylaxis guidelines. Faster relief for tough allergy symptoms.įiedler C, Miehe U, Treudler R, Kiess W, Prenzel F. Safety and efficacy of venom immunotherapy: a real life study. Kołaczek A, Skorupa D, Antczak-Marczak M, Kuna P, Kupczyk M. Risk of anaphylaxis in patients with large local reactions to hymenoptera stings: a retrospective and prospective study. Pucci S, D'Alò S, De Pasquale T, Illuminati I, Makri E, Incorvaia C. Anaphylaxis.Īmerican Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology. doi:10.1016/j.anai.2016.10.031Īmerican College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Stinging insect hypersensitivity: A practice parameter. Advances in diagnosis and management of insect sting allergy. Stinging insect allergy: current perspectives on venom immunotherapy.
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