A unit of pain intensity used in medical research to measure subjective pain experienced by patients.
An acronym standing for 'dolor' (Latin for 'pain'), proposed by Eugene Lasker in 1939 as a measurement unit, though it never gained widespread clinical adoption.
Dols are a fascinating failed experiment in science—we created a unit to measure something unmeasurable (subjective pain), realized it was impossible to standardize, and abandoned the term by mid-century. It's in dictionaries as a ghost-word of scientific optimism!
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