Chronic pain rewires your brain and spinal cord

"We're beginning to appreciate that chronic pain is a disease in its own right and a disease that can be very sneaky and very difficult to manage," says Sean Mackey, MD, chief of the Division of Pain Management at Stanford University School of Medicine, in Palo Alto, Calif.

"It causes fundamental changes to our nervous system. It rewires our brains and our spinal cords and when it does that it's very challenging to reverse that wiring and bring it back to normal," says Dr. Mackey. "And that's what a lot of us are doing research to do right now."

Andrea Cooper, 52, a fibromyalgia sufferer from Phoenix, Md., is intimately acquainted with the phenomenon: "In someone who has a normal pain response, the pain will stop. But [with chronic pain] it's like the brain never gets the signal back that it doesn't hurt anymore. The alarm just keeps going off."

Why is this happening to me?
Pain teaches all creatures who suffer it not to do things that caused them injury the first time around—a useful evolutionary tool. Wracked by chronic pain, though, the human sufferer may well wonder, What is the point of this? When chronic pain is understood as a disease, rather than a warning sign, it becomes clear that there is no point, only a poorly understood mechanism. But as science better understands that mechanism, new pain strategies are being developed to help bring the pain under control.