National Geographic: Scientists are learning how to interrupt pain before it forms

Read the full article by Alexandra Marvar in National Geographic.

One in ten people worldwide now lives with chronic pain—a condition medicine still struggles to treat without creating new harm. After the collapse of the “pain-free” promise that fueled the opioid crisis, doctors are rethinking what pain actually is—and where it can be changed.

Nearly 20 years ago, pediatric anesthesiologist and researcher Amy Baxter began exploring that question by poking people in the arm with a toothpick—on sidewalks, at dinner tables, wherever she could recruit a volunteer. “Tell me when the sensation turns from sharp to dull,” she’d say, while holding a vibrating device against their skin until the sensation changed and writing down their data.

Today, pain is no longer understood as an on–off switch to be flipped, but as a dynamic conversation between the body and the brain. Sensory signals are shaped by context, memory, and emotion, and those signals can be amplified, muted, or redirected at multiple stages. 

For decades, pain medicine has focused on what happens after pain reaches the brain. A new wave of research is shifting attention earlier, to sensory nerves, where nociceptive signals can be altered before the brain constructs pain at all.