The Independent Interview Professor Irene Tracey about Research on Pain

Pembroke Fellow, Professor Irene Tracey, was recently interviewed by the Independent about the major shifts in our understanding of chronic pain. Professor Tracey is the Head of Department and Nuffield Chair in Anaesthetic Science in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford.

The interview with Professor Tracey enriches a larger article titled, ‘How much does it hurt? The Methods Used by Doctors to Measure Pain’.

Addressing previous understandings of chronic pain, she explains the paradigm shift in the field:

“We always thought of it as acute pain that just goes on and on – and if chronic pain is just a continuation of acute pain, let’s fix the thing that caused the acute and the chronic should go away. That has spectacularly failed.

Now we think of chronic pain as a shift to another place, with different mechanisms, such as changes in genetic expression, chemical release, neurophysiology and wiring. We’ve got all these completely new ways of thinking about chronic pain.”

In this conversation  Professor Tracey unravels how perception and circumstance can impact how we experience pain. She explains that the recent developments in neuroimaging have transformed how subjective pain can be reconciled with object perception.

“It fills that space between what you can see and what’s being reported. We can plug that gap and explain why the patient is in pain even though you can’t see it on your X-ray or whatever. You’re helping to bring truth and validity to these poor people who are in pain but not believed.” 

Professor Tracey remarked on the interesting correlation between the implementation of technological advancements in both the games industry and medical world. Wearable devices that manipulate parts of the brain are used for different purposes in both fields; “They [the games industry] are developing the technology really fast, and we can use it in medical applications”.

Click here to read the full article. Information about Professor Tracey’s research and a list of publications can be found here.