So right after posting this I found a report called “Problem area report: pain” published by the Happier Lives Institute. (It seems they have taken the report off their website but you can find it on archive.org)
They say this: “We considered investigating other pain-related problems, but decided not to: … Kidney stones and trigeminal neuralgia – although very painful conditions, they are not as painful as cluster headaches or as common as advanced cancer.”
It’s not clear to me that cluster headaches are much more painful than kidney stones. Really what needs to be done is more Fermi estimation. Data on kidney stone pain frequency and duration seem non-existent. Doing the estimate would require some digging through personal reports online and possibly conducting surveys. I have other stuff I want to write so I pushed out this post without going down that rabbit hole.
So right after posting this I found a report called “Problem area report: pain” published by the Happier Lives Institute. (It seems they have taken the report off their website but you can find it on archive.org)
They say this: “We considered investigating other pain-related problems, but decided not to: … Kidney stones and trigeminal neuralgia – although very painful conditions, they are not as painful as cluster headaches or as common as advanced cancer.”
It’s not clear to me that cluster headaches are much more painful than kidney stones. Really what needs to be done is more Fermi estimation. Data on kidney stone pain frequency and duration seem non-existent. Doing the estimate would require some digging through personal reports online and possibly conducting surveys. I have other stuff I want to write so I pushed out this post without going down that rabbit hole.
Hi Dan. Thanks for referencing our report, which can be found at www.happierlivesinstitute.org/report/global-priority-pain