You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

Back in 2017, in episode 167 of this show, I spoke to cardiologist Ted of Varight, who had just written a book called

Modern Death. It's a topic that we don't talk about nearly as much because, well, who wants

to think about their own mortality, but one that is incredibly important, since, of course,

we're all going to get there and we're all going to have our loved ones get there.

And maybe we can make that passage a little less difficult.

I really liked his book.

And then a couple years later in 2019, when his second book, State of the Heart, came out,

I found I learned so much more about what we know, about how our heart functions, how well

we can treat heart disease, and all of the strides that medicine is made in that domain. But when

it comes to medicine, there's another topic that really is pretty baffling, and that's pain.

We don't really have a biomarker for pain. I can't really tell

how much pain you're in unless you tell me about it. And then what do I know? Are you the kind of

person that exaggerates or minimizes? The subjective nature of pain is one of the reasons

why we have a lot of inequalities in the way that

people are treated by the medical system. It's also the cause of a lot of human suffering. And so

it's kind of amazing that we don't understand it as well as you'd think we would. I mean, just recently,

there was a Nobel Prize awarded to scientists who had discovered

...