Pain is deeply personal, not just emotional pain, but physical pain too.

Doctors have diligently worked to come up with pain scales to measure and standardize its intensity.

Medical researchers have toiled away at drug development using clinical trials to measure

the effectiveness of painkillers. But when you are in pain, the only person who can

really understand how you feel is you, which is why developing a safe, effective

painkiller can be such an odyssey, especially given

the severity of the opioid crisis. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Courtney Collins,

in for Chris Boyd. My guest, Rivka Gal Chen, has been looking into this challenge. She's a staff

writer for the New Yorker who also has a medical degree. Her recent piece in the

magazine is called The Radical Development of an Entirely New Pain Killer. And she joins us now to talk

about it. Rivka, welcome to think. Hi, thanks so much for having me here, Courtney. So before we dig

into the journey to develop a novel painkiller, I think it's worth spending a little bit of time

kind of untangling why pain is such a beast to tackle. First of all, there are so many different

kinds of pain, right? Yeah, and I think that's something we sort of forget. I think a lot of us

think about pain in terms of intensity, but then when we introspect about our own pain and we

learn about other people's pain, there's actually so many different causes and so many

different kind of flavors or tenors of pain. The beginning of the piece was such a great read

because you kind of dive into this article describing how pain can stab, it can radiate. It can pulse. It can, you know, be transient. It can be chronic. It can be acute. When you started, when I was reading that, all of a sudden, like every nerve ending on my body, I was like, oh, no, my heel is throbbing and my head feels itchy. All of a sudden, you forget that pain, it feels different to every single person who experiences it.

So it's really hard to measure.

So hard to measure.

And as you're saying, there's that funny thing where when you sort of hear someone describing their pain, you develop a kind of sympathetic pain.

Right.

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