Pain Treatment Will to Become More Targeted as Knowledge of Pain Mechanics Increases

They also found something even more astounding: The amount of medication needed to produce a reduction in the von Frey threshold—a measure of the response to a pain stimulus—was about 10 times higher than the amount needed to return a mouse to a normal running regimen.

“It turns out that we were measuring the wrong thing—if you measure pain in terms of what the animal chooses to do, the dose becomes spot on,” Dr. Woolf said. “The message here is that if you ask the right question, there’s a chance you may get the right answer.”

Thomas Collins is a freelance medical journalist based in Florida.