For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Lewis, in for Rachel Feldman.
From stubbing your toe to dealing with the occasional headache or sore back, to experience pain is to be human.
And for minor aches and pains, the occasional over-the-counter medication is usually enough.
But what happens if the pain we're dealing with isn't a one-off?
What happens when that pain becomes chronic?
According to 2023 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
roughly a quarter of U.S. Adults experience chronic pain.
Rachel Zofnitz, a pain scientist and an assistant clinical professor at the University of California,
San Francisco, who also teaches pain science at Stanford University,
argues that pain is often misunderstood by the general public and by doctors.
The end result, she says in her new book, Tell Me Where It Hurts,
The New Science of Pain and How to Heal, is that many of us are suffering for more pain than necessary.
I talked with Rachel about our misconceptions around pain and what we can do to reduce how much pain is in our lives.
Here's our conversation.
So what got you into studying pain?
A couple of things.
First of all, I was scared of pain.
You know, pain's an aversive experience, and I think most humans are scared of pain.
But when I took my first neuroscience class as an undergrad nerd at Brown University,
I discovered that pain lived at the intersection of all these things I wanted to study.