Resumen de Pain: hitting where it hurts
An estimated 10 million people in the UK and a fifth of the world's population has chronic pain, lasting 12 weeks or more. For many of them, treatments provide little relief. Even the strongest drugs often don't eliminate discomfort, and come with serious side effects. Not to mention they are addictive, make pain worse long-term and are all too easy to accidentally overdose on. Now, though, researchers are starting to tackle the problem by rethinking the root causes of chronic pain. Rather than seeing it as a lingering version of the acute form, they have begun to recognize it as a complex disorder of the nervous system that changes the brain's structure, chemistry and activity. Here, Hamzelou determines ways to break the pain cycle.
