Why Pain Is So Hard To Treat
“We use ‘pain’ as one word, but I think it reflects a panoply of different disorders,” says David Julius, chair of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, who has spent decades trying to understand how humans perceive pain.
Pain can be recovery from a broken ankle or a pulled wisdom tooth. It can be migraines, or backaches, or the burning of chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or debilitating sickle cell episodes. Pain can be in muscles, bones, nerves.