How do you measure pain?

Oxford Sparks Big Questions

We all feel pain differently. What to one person may be the worst pain in the world, might be a mild irritation to another person; but why? At the moment, we don’t have a thorough understanding of how pain is processed, meaning it is difficult to devise treatments for chronic pain. In this episode of the ‘Big Questions’ podcast, we are lucky enough to join Dr Andy Segerdahl – a neuroscientist at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) and the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford – for one of his experiments, where he is examining pain response (in a willing volunteer!) using an fMRI scanner. As he explains, if we can fully understand which parts of the brain and spinal cord are involved in pain response in a healthy individual, we can begin to understand how this response becomes dysfunctional.