0:00
Hello, my name is
Geoff Woods, and I work
in the Department of Medical
Genetics in Cambridge.
And I'm both a clinician
and a researcher
who works on Mendelian
disorders of pain.
The talk I'm giving you today
is called congenital syndromes
of pain, that's people
who get excess pain,
and painlessness, people
who suffer no pain at all.
0:22
What is pain?
Pain can be thought of
in two different ways.
It can be what we perceive as an
unpleasant stimulus in our brain
when we're conscious.
But it is also the body recognizing
when there's tissue damage,
such as at the bottom picture
with severe frostbite.
Or also, more
sophisticatedly, when tissues
are about to be damaged
if a stimulus continues.
And often people differentiate
pain, which is the tissue damage,
from suffering, which is
the perception of the tissue
damage by our central
nervous system.
0:57
How much pain is someone suffering?
It's very difficult to tell, because
there are no objective measures.
We can observe pain by
empathy, but we can't really
grade how much pain one
person is suffering compared
to another person or
compared to ourselves.
And we also can't
tell whether someone
is in physical pain or emotional
pain, or a mixture of the two.
And this has made a lot of
studies, pain, and analgesics
very difficult.
1:29
What is the use of pain?
When it's just not there to
make a suffer on the earth,
it has two major functions.
The first is to help us protect
our bodies, to avoid harm,
and to allow us to give our bodies
time in a situation to heal.
And the second role of
pain is developmental,
allowing us to use
our bodies optimally.
