More than 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, but researchers at the Interdisciplinary Pain Management Clinic in Research Park are working to help ease their pain.
"For a couple decades, we've been treating chronic pain," said Richard Chapman, a professor of anesthesiology and a doctor at the clinic. "The goal is to get people who are disabled and crippled by pain and suffering back on their feet and functioning."
Although the ultimate goal is to figure out what causes pain and how to fix it, pain is a personal experience, which can make it difficult to measure it, Chapman said.
"It's become very clear over the last decade or so that pain is not a simple message that goes from an injury to the spinal cord up to the brain and rings a little bell someplace," Chapman said. Rather, it's a complicated process involving emotion, sensation and all kinds of associations and meanings, he said.
Through the clinic's psychophysiology lab, researchers work to study physiological measures related to stress and emotion to better understand "how people hurt, what keeps people hurting as opposed to healing and insights how we might target interventions," Chapman said.
The clinic uses a wide range of volunteers. Studies don't normally include people younger than 18, but human subjects range from healthy, typical students to patients with chronic pain.
Participants are usually compensated, depending on the study, and make about $10 an hour.
Many who participate aren't concerned with the money, but understand the importance of the research and have relatives or know someone suffering from pain, Chapman said.
Researchers measure how pain affects people by administering small, painful shocks to volunteers and seeing how the brain reacts through brain imaging.
A small metal electrode is placed into the skin and patients are stimulated with shocks that feel like "pin pricks," Chapman said. Each participant has a different threshold for pain and has different tolerances to what is painful.
Patients who suffer from fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disorder that causes fatigue and muscle pain in many areas of the body, usually can tolerate lesser amounts of pain than people who do not suffer from the condition, Chapman said.
"Brain imaging is not about telling how one is thinking, but how the brain reacts to pain," said Yoshio Nakamura, a professor in the department of anesthesiology and a doctor at the clinic.
The brains of people who suffer from chronic pain show different patterns of brain activity and react differently to pain than others, allowing researchers a better understanding on how to treat them, Nakamura said.
Developing medication to cure chronic pain might not always be the answer. The clinic is also looking into alternative ways to treat chronic pain. Stress-relieving activities such as yoga and meditation can help alleviate pain -- an approach many embrace in the clinic if proper medication isn't available, Nakamura said.
Although some push for the use of strong drugs to treat pain, other researchers are opposed to long-term drug use as a solution, which has been an ongoing debate in the medical community, Nakamura said.
"We're very interested in pain and suffering," Chapman said. "Our job is to contribute to the growing understanding of the mechanisms of pain and ways to alleviate it."
Anyone interested in volunteering for the study can visit www.painresearch.utah.edu or call 585-7690.
