COVID cases are climbing fast. Again, two new BA2 sub variants have been discovered in

the Northeast in the United States. President Biden signs an executive order to regulate

ghost guns. Just as a gunman on a Brooklyn subway reminds us how desperately we need

a gun-reform. This is America Dissective. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Elsaid.

Pain is both the beginning and the end of illness. Let me explain what I mean by that. Most people

only go to the doctor when they're feeling some sort of pain. At pain is telling them

something's just not right. It's in provider parlance, the quote unquote, chief complaint.

And no matter what a doctor does to address any underlying pathology, addressing pain

is for most. They can fix everything. People don't really feel like you fixed anything at

all. Biologically, pain is the firing of a set of neurons from part of the body experiencing

that pain to your central nervous system, which then registers the experience of pain

in your brain. We're hardwired to avoid pain, which is by definition a noxious stimulus.

It turns out that pain, however, well, painful it is, is an extremely effective system for

self-preservation. There's this extremely rare genetic disease that knocks out the body's

ability to feel physical pain. This congenital insensitivity to pain occurs because of a mutation

in a protein that's critical to the function of your pain neurons, rendering them incapable

of firing the pain stimulus to your brain. You might think that it'd be great never

to have to feel pain, but people with congenital insensitivity to pain don't usually live past

25. They simply don't know about the bumps and bruises and burns and cuts that you and

I learned to avoid and care for because, well, they're painful. The irony is that pain

is a lifesaver, but pain isn't simply a biological phenomenon. It's a social one,

too. Consider the millions of Americans who suffer unexplained chronic pain. They can't

...