A New and Completely Different Pain Medicine

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.

When you stub your toe or get a paper cut on your finger, you feel the pain in that part of your body. It feels like the pain is coming from that place. But, of course, that's not really what is happening. Pain doesn't really happen in your toe or your finger. It happens in your brain.

It's a game of telephone, really. The afferent nerve fiber detects the noxious stimulus, passing that signal to the second-order neuron in the dorsal root ganglia of the spinal cord, which runs it up to the thalamus to be passed to the third-order neuron which brings it to the cortex for localization and conscious perception. It's not even a very good game of telephone. It takes about 100 ms for a pain signal to get from the hand to the brain — longer from the feet, given the greater distance. You see your foot hit the corner of the coffee table and have just enough time to think Oh no!before the pain hits.