How The Brain Shapes Pain And Links Ouch With Emotion [npr.org]
When Sterling Witt was a teenager in Missouri, he was diagnosed with scoliosis. Before long, the curvature of his spine started causing chronic pain. It was "this low-grade kind of menacing pain that ran through my spine and mostly my lower back and my upper right shoulder blade and then even into my neck a little bit," Witt says. The pain was bad. But the feeling of helplessness it produced in him was even worse. "I felt like I was being attacked by this invisible enemy," Witt says. "It was...