Welcome to Chasing Life.

If you've ever gone to the doctor to talk about pain, then you've probably had to go through some typical dance of giving that pain a score from 1 to 10.

Maybe you were shown a scale of smiley faces, two sad faces, and maybe you also thought at that time, this is a little crazy.

This is the best we can do to measure pain with basically emojis.

When a man named Ed Maui stepped into Dr. Prasad Shavalker's office in 2021,

he had undoubtedly answered that question hundreds of times.

I'm not exaggerating.

He was 51 years old and had been suffering from complex regional pain syndrome.

Chronic pain since he was 15.

He described it as a sharp, stabbing, burning over his entire body,

and he had no clear explanation why.

When I first met Ed, he was in dire straits.

He had had 25 surgeries.

He was unable to work.

He essentially was living in New Mexico with a dream, a dream that he's held for 20 years of producing an album.

You know, he's a prolific musician.

But it was the pain and everything that came along with the pain

that really stood in the way of him meeting his dream.

So, Ed came to Dr. Chevalker because he's a specialist in pain medicine

at the University of California, San Francisco,

but also because he is one of the world's leading researchers

in developing something that is really revolutionary.

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