Meds & Supplements, Society, Treatment

Pain Patient or Criminal?

Punishing Pain, an op-ed piece The New York Times published yesterday, describes one man’s struggle to get adequate pain relief. It’s a fight that ultimately landed him in jail. You’ll have to register to read the article, but it’s worth it.

“When I visited Richard Paey here, it quickly became clear that he posed no menace to society in his new home, a high-security Florida state prison near Tampa, where he was serving a 25-year sentence. The fences, topped with razor wire, were more than enough to keep him from escaping because Mr. Paey relies on a wheelchair to get around.”

Linda25 shared this article on the BrainTalk forums.

News & Research

Brain Scans Show Nerve Activation with Pain

Pain researchers at Stanford experimenting with a type of MRI that shows where pain occurs in the brain and how to control it. The scans indicate where pain is activated, how it is being processed and how it comes about. Researchers hope that eventually such imaging can be used to test pain medications and see the effects in real-time. Since patients can sit in the brain scanner and see the areas of the brain that are activated by pain, it could also be used in meditation or mental imaging. This technology has many potential uses and may one day be used for all types of pain patients; but it is years away from being available to patients.

The story, Tracking and Controlling Pain by Sight, is available on the NPR website. Written media reports of it don’t seem to be available yet, but you can read the researchers’ abstract from the American Pain Society’s 2004 annual meeting.

Thanks to koober1 on the Brain Talk migraine forum for sharing this story.

Note added 12/14/05: The researchers’ abstract is no longer available, but the NPR piece is.