The Riddle Of Pain
Dr. Ben Seymour is conducting research on pain, a condition that has plagued humans for centuries and affects thousands of people worldwide every day. The professor of clinical neuroscience and honorary consultant neurologist at Oxford University in Oxford, England, is exploring the mystery of pain, which protects the body during injury but can linger beyond its usefulness, resulting in chronic pain.
Pain is so complex that people often struggle to describe the discomfort they are feeling. Seymour believes this is probably because pain originates from an ancient part of the brain. “It kind of has a primeval sense to it,” Seymour told The Observer in England.“That’s what probably makes it so difficult to treat, too.”
When asked how he would describe pain, Seymour paused for a moment before responding.
“Well… It’s part sense, part emotion, part feeling, part qualia,” he began. “It’s also fundamental to the notion of who we are. Nothing else ties you to your own body, to the present moment. I’d argue that pain is the requirement that precipitated the evolution of movement. Even an amoeba knows the most important thing is not to get squashed.”
Seymour said his interest in pain began while he was a medical student in Manchester and noticed his colleagues’ “dismissive” attitude about pain. Seymour felt they viewed pain as an annoying side effect of medicine rather than something that needed immediate attention.
“No one was taking it seriously,” Seymour recalled. “I thought of it as one of the hardest problems to solve in medicine. I wanted to understand and figure it out.”
In an attempt to find answers to the riddle of pain, Seymour is designing a research trial using virtual reality (VR) in his laboratory at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Oxford, England. Emma Cook, an assistant editor for The Observer Magazine, is no stranger to pain. Cook said she has suffered from “endless attacks” of cystitis, a common acute urinary tract infection, which she calls “a poorly understood condition that causes untold misery for thousands of women each year.”
“I felt dismissed by GPs who were unable to offer anything more than yet another stick to pee on and repeat prescriptions of antibiotics,” Cook wrote in an article for The Observer. “After years of suffering, one male registrar suggested cranberry juice and wearing cotton pants. I wanted to scream at him, but I cried instead.”
Cook was eventually referred to a pain management center where a urologist was able to prescribe medication to treat her condition, which she described as a “sensation of crushed glass every time I peed.”
Back in Seymour’s lab, Cook wore a VR headset with controls in each hand. Through her headset, she found herself in a vivid jungle setting, complete with palm trees and prickly pineapples on the ground. When she bent down to pick up the pineapples, each one sent a small electric shock through her electrode. Once the study is underway, Cook said participants will be connected to an EEG, allowing researchers to interpret any spikes in brain activity on the screen.
Cook was asked to describe the pain she felt from a series of small but sharp electrical shocks coming from the electrode attached to her index finger. This was a challenging task. Cook said the only word that came to mind was “unpleasant.” However, as the electric shocks became more intense, Cook noted the feeling reminded her of an “excruciating jellyfish sting last summer.”
The electric shock to the finger is comparable to an injury signal, a short, sharp warning pain to alert us to danger. “It’s the ‘ow’ one,” Seymour explained. “I call it the wasp as it has a kind of angriness to it.”
Developing A Pain-Control Device For Stroke Survivors
As Seymour designs a pain trial, his colleague Tim Denison, a professor of engineering science at Oxford University, is developing a deep-brain stimulation device to help stroke survivors control their pain. The goal is to embed a small device deep in the brain that can be measured and controlled remotely. This type of device could help patients monitor their own brain activity in the future.
“I do think that in the course of 50 years, neural technology like this will become much more integrated with human experience,” Denison told The Observer. “We want to design something where users can actually be in control.”
Scottish Woman Lives Nearly Pain Free
Jo Cameron from Whitebridge, Scotland, made headlines worldwide in 2019 after an interview with The Guardian revealed her inability to feel pain.
Cameron, who is in her 70s, said she has scars all over and frequently cuts her fingers, only noticing it when she sees the blood. She didn’t even need pain medication after recovering from surgery.
“I’ve never felt a thing,” Cameron said in the interview. “If something cuts or digs into me, I register the touch or the pressure, but nothing beyond that.”
Cameron became the focus of researchers from the University College London (UCL) who believe that she has a rare gene mutation that not only gives her the ability to feel virtually no pain but also reduces her fear and anxiety.
“When I was 71, I went zip-lining and got stuck halfway along,” Cameron recalled. “I knew if I dropped down, I would die instantly, but I thought if I stayed still, someone would come and fetch me, which they did. I didn’t panic, but if you never feel pain, it’s easier to think about things clearly.”
When asked if she could, would she want to feel pain like everyone else, Cameron did not hesitate to answer. “No. I accept the way I am. I’m happy being me. When other people are in pain, I can see by their expression and the changes in them that something awful is happening. But what that awful is, I’ll never know.”
The UCL research team hopes that insights from Cameron’s case will aid in the development of new treatments for a range of conditions.
“We hope that with time, our findings might contribute to clinical research for post-operative pain and anxiety, and potentially chronic pain, PTSD, and wound healing, perhaps involving gene therapy techniques,” Dr. James Cox, one of the lead researchers, said in a statement.
A Different Way to Express Pain
Because many people find it difficult to describe pain, Seymour and his research team have partnered with London-based artist Marysa Dowling on a project that encourages sufferers to express their pain through art and writing.
“I’m not an artist, but I wanted to be able to describe my pain through photography,” Clare, who has secondary breast cancer, told The Observer. “I can see why it’s been extremely difficult to get the right pain relief because there is no language for it. The nearest I can come up with is weird and wonderful similes, like bees trapped in a vent or ants crawling inside me. Working with photography has been a way of somehow getting to the core of things.”
Source Links:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/dec/22/ouch-solving-the-riddle-of-pain?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/made-at-ucl/stories/woman-novel-gene-mutation-lives-almost-pain-free
