Woman who has never felt pain experiences it for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Woman who has never felt pain experiences it for the first time

newscientist.com

50 pointskawera16 comments

This is the real paper [1]. It is open access.

1. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151204/ncomms9967/full/nco...

The sections of this paper are, in order: Abstract, Introduction, Results, Methods, Additional information, Accession codes, References, Acknowledgements, Author information, Supplementary information

Is it typical to present the methods after the results in medical research papers? And to have the author info and acknowledgements after the main write-up?

In my field we were consistently taught to present the intro/lit review (i.e. set-up the problem space), then methods (i.e. how we're trying to solve the problem that we just laid out for you), then the results (i.e. using the methods that the reader now knows, here's the data), and finally any interpretations of the results.

In addition, I was always taught that author info and acknowledgements go before the main write-up. This is to help illuminate potential biases (e.g. research into gun-related violence will read very differently if either the National Rifle Association or the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence funded the research).

More so than the field, the order will depend on the editors and journal in my experience. Anecdotally, in the field I work in (Material Science/Condensed Matter Physics) I have written and read papers in all different orders but the order seen in this paper is pretty normal to me. You want people to get through your work (abstract, intro, results) and then the nitty gritty details come later for the people that want to use your work for something more than an interesting read.

It's not uncommon. And yeah, a lot of medical journals do it.

In physics, the acknowledgements always come near the end, after the main write up, just before the list of references.

The article doesn't explain what her reaction was? That seems like the most interesting perspective to me.

"She was burned with a laser, and quite liked the experience."

So she didn't actually experience pain as defined in a dictionary.

Eh, I know a number of masochists who "quite like the experience" of pain.

They like to have skin cut, salt pored in? Scraping their eyeballs over a blackboard until they bleed?

I think your are talking about different pain than laser burning.

Most definitions of pain of pain contain terms like torment, distress, suffering. Not what someone would like. If someone never felt pain before and they say upon feeling something that they like it, you think they really feel pain? It sounds more likely to me that she felt something different. She wouldn't know of course, if what she felt was pain.

She probably liked the novelty of it; she had never felt pain before, so it was completely new to her.

I recently suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns over much of my right leg. If she liked the experience of being burned, they were doing it wrong. I know that a 1st degree laser burn is much less painful than what I experienced, but burns are some of the worst pain you can experience. I would say its as much of a mental "game" as it is physical reaction. 2 shots of dilaudid knocked the pain from an 8-10 to a 3-4 for me. I cannot imagine the hell some people experience with large swaths of their bodies being burned. I guess I've strayed off topic some, but I just cant imagine a burn as every being pleasurable.

Well, for someone who's never experienced pain, it's probably more novel than anything else. She has no instinctual understanding of the meaning of pain.

If anything, her ability to experience pain may represent a good thing in her mind. People without pain can do incredible damage to themselves unknowingly, and many have serious injuries from when they were children and hadn't yet trained themselves to be cautious. So, to her, getting to experience pain may represent relief from the stress and vigilance of trying to deliberately protect her body.

Seems she wasn't up for an interview. Anonymous and the little info we have from her experience was what was impressed on the doctor.

The upside of this is that we may have found a new way to cure different types of pain. A Nav1.7 blocker + low grade opioids seems to result in the same painlessness felt by people with this disease.

Nav1.7 blockers are off the shelf: http://www.tocris.com/dispprod.php?ItemId=272948#.VmW57eMrJE...

Opiods too!

> He has taken out a patent on the use of the two drugs for pain relief.

Are you trying to get sued?

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