Tweeting about pain: comparing self-reported toothache experiences with those of backaches, earaches and headaches.

Background: The authors conducted a study of tweets posted on Twitter to compare self-reported toothache experiences with those of backache, earache and headache in regard to pain intensity, action taken, perceived cause and effect of pain.

Methods: From a total of 508,591 relevant tweets collected on seven nonconsecutive days, the authors randomly selected 1,204 tweets (301 per pain type) and conducted content analyses of each tweet.

Results: Toothaches were described as having higher pain intensity than were earaches or headaches but pain intensity comparable with that of backaches.