Can We Smoke the Chronic?

Chronic pain. While many will wince at those words, others will roll their eyes, not understanding the relentless hammering of unending and often unexplainable pain; and doctors will sometimes just want sufferers out of their office, because no one likes a puzzle they can’t solve. But science is finally starting to get some clues and they point to a set of nervous system cells called glia. David Dobbs in the NYT (Gift Article): The Quiet Scientific Revolution That May Solve Chronic Pain. “If you’re hearing this for the first time and you’re one of the billion-plus people on Earth who suffer from chronic pain (meaning pain lasting beyond three to six months that has no apparent cause or has become independent of the injury or illness that caused it), you might be tempted to say that your glia are botching their pain-management job. And you’d be right. For in chronic pain, researchers now believe, glia drive a healthy pain network into a dysregulated state, sending false and destructive pain signals that never end. Pain then becomes not a warning of harm, but a source of it; not a symptom, but, as Stanford pain researcher Elliot Krane puts it, ‘its own disease.'” The pain cycle is real. It’s not “in your mind.” And we’re might find it.