Brian Weinshenker:
The pain you’re describing there, we call neurogenic pain, or pain from the nervous system. The way I explain it to patients is, the brain likes to get information in a very coordinated way. So, when messages come through the spinal cord, and they go through an area where the mile and is stripped off the nerves, and the messages get all scrambled, the brain doesn’t get it the way it likes to. When it gets it in that scrambled way, it perceives it as pain. So patients complain of things like burning, prickling, those kinds of terms, and neurogenic pain tends to be the worst kind of pain we see. It, would be say, worse than if you stretched a ligament or a tendon or had musculoskeletal pain. Now, it’s very hard to compare pain. But I would say, in general, neurogenic pain is among the most disturbing for patients.
Brian Weinshenker:
So, we, fortunately, have treatments to try to take the edge off neurogenic pain. But we don’t know a good way to unscramble messages so that the brain gets them in the right sequence, that it likes to get them. So we just have to deal with it.
