Headline July 19, 2017/ ''' PUFF... \ *PAIN* / ...PANT '''

''' PUFF... \ *PAIN* / ...PANT '''

''*WELL  -ZILLI,  IN THE DAYS AHEAD,   will you consider  briefing me on the state,  involvement  and participation   on the World Students Society-

Of the  Students of  :   Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan: Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Somalia, Madagascar, Hungary, Poland, Iceland, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Mongolia, Bhutan, Lebanon, Jordan, ........and on and on..............?*'' 

STUDENT  STEPHEN WAXMAN   -while studying at the  Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the early 1970s,    became interested    in the very philosophy and terror of pain-

How people feel,    how the body transmits it, and how,     as a future neurologist, he could learn to control it. Later in his career, after his father was in the final stages of   agonizing diabetic neuropathy-

He became obsessed with helping patients like his dad, who could find no relief from their pain. ''We simply had to better,'' he says............And so we shall, but in the meanwhile..................

IF you burn yourself on a stove, it hurts. More specifically, the nerve cells in your hand sense the heat and send pain signals to your spinal cord.

The signals then travel up the brain, which instructs you to howl with pain or issue the appropriate profanity. That's what is known as acute pain.

It can stab, or pinch or shock, hurting like hell and telling us to stop doing what we are doing, take care of ourselves, get medicine, get help.

the medical community knows how to treat most acute pain. Temporary prescriptions for opioids dull the sting from surgical incisions; anti-inflammatories can mask the discomfort a sprain.

Acute pain persists, but it also goes away. Acute pain is also to empathise with : Show someone an image of a pair of scissors cutting a hand, and the observer's brain will react as much as if their own hand were being pinched.

Chronic pain, on the other hand, is a phantom; an enduring ache that does not turn off. It can be inflammatory  [brought on diseases like arthritis] or neuropathic [affecting the nerves, as in some cases of shingles, diabetes, or chemotherapy treatments]. 

Some chronic pain never even traces back to coherent cause, which makes it that much harder to understand.    Give us broken bones,    burn marks, blood     -in the absence of proof [or personal experience], the hidden pain of others is just so easy to dismiss.

As a child,  Teacher Costa would dawdle in deep gutters lining the streets near her home, the cool, mucky water providing her momentary pain relief. 

In class room she would wrap her hands and feet around poles of a desk, like Koala, to feel the coolness. And she'd sneak off to water fountains to wipe down her limbs with cold water.   

Doctors didn't know how to diagnose her. Some adults thought she had behavioral issue or depression.

One physician said her symptoms were  psychosomatic. The plum color was the only visible evidence that she might have any medical disorder at all. Then, in 1977, a letter arrived from Mayo Clinic.

A cousin had been referred to the medical center after complaining of constant pain,  and the doctors there, intrigued by the mysterious condition, had begun interviewing members of Costa's extended family.

They discovered that many of them had the same symptoms  [redness, irritation, swelling], and they found that  29 members of Costa's family, spanning five generations, appeared to have  man on fire syndrome.

After corresponding with Teacher Costa's parents and learning about her symptoms, a Mayo  researcher told them that their daughter had apparently inherited the same problem.    

But a diagnoses didn't mean that anyone understood why it happened or how it could be treated.

The researchers created a family tree for the Costas, identifying every relative with erythromelalgia. For Costa, it was stunning to see the clean, clinical diagram of  hereditary hurt.

And though she realized there was a chance she  wouldn't pass on her condition to any children she might have, she wasn't going to take the risk.

''I had my tubes tied right after my 18th birthday,'' she tells me, a hint of grief filling her voice.

''Always, since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a mother more than anything else in the world.'' When dating, she;d tell her suitors that she couldn't have biological children. 

''That was a deal breaker for many guys,'' she says. Teacher Costa eventually did get married, and in 2000 she and her husband adopted a daughter.

For most of her life, the underlying cause of her condition remained a mystery, both to her and to the  global scientific community.

But that began to change in 2004 with a discovery in a Beijing lab. Scientists there  had studied a family in which three generations had been affected with  *man on fire*.

They found that, of the 20,000 plus genes that make up the recently mapped human genome, mutations in a single gene, SCN9A, were somehow linked to eythromelalgia.

It was the first evidence of a specific genetic cause of  man on fire, and for people like  Teacher Costa it was a sign of great hope.  

*With time,   and today,     Stephen Waxman that feeling and caring  student of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, of 70s,  is the  director of the Center for Neuroscience and  Regeneration Research at the-

Yale University School of Medicine.

The Honour and Serving of the latest Operational Research on Health, Life and  Hopeless Diseases    continues.

With respectful dedication to all the Patients suffering from   undiagnosed agonies,   Research Scientists, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world studying medicine. 

See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Pain & Power '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless