(Bloomberg) -- For everyone, pain is a fact of life. For some, it’s excruciating and inescapable. But for a few, certain unique genetic characteristics have enabled them to avoid the kind of pain most humans take for granted. Driven in part by the deadly fallout of the opioid crisis, scientists have been developing new technologies to limit pain, in part by using what they’ve learned from the select individuals who live without it.
On this episode of The Future with Hannah Fry, Fry meets a young woman who has learned to live with the constant affliction of pain, traveling to Hartrlepool, UK, to hear from Amy Pohl, a rising Tik Tok star whose agonizing experiences with the disease CPRS led her to seek solutions outside of western medicine. Fry also interviews a pain research participant named Steven who discovered as a child that he could not experience pain. His genetic condition may indicate that a single protein can somehow determine whether one feels pain or not. If scientists can isolate and control it, it might be a huge step toward a new method of controlling pain.
At the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, Fry meets Dr. Dave Bennett, who explains how chemo-genetics might enable humans to turn pain on and off like a switch. Also at Oxford, Professor Irene Tracy shows Fry how she uses magnetic resonance imaging to see the actual, complex patterns of pain inside the brain.
And finally, Fry travels In Singapore, where Professor Lau Tang Ching discusses the impact that culture, and many ancient practices, have on pain and where the right balance for the future might be.
See all episodes of The Future with Hannah Fry here.See the latest videos from Bloomberg Originals here.
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