Some years ago Camilla Nord suffered such persistent pain at the site of an old injury that doctors thought she would need major surgery – a joint replacement in her foot. To delay this for a few months, they injected the foot with steroids. Steroids wear off – but nearly a decade later, the pain was still much reduced. To Nord, whose day job is running the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, this was fascinating. Not all of her pain, it seemed, came from her foot.
As Nord knew, chronic pain can cause physiological changes in the brain – a process that is now measurable in the lab. It seemed to her that her brain, as she puts it in her recent book, The Balanced Brain, “had become used to pain, monitored pain, and had begun to enhance the sensation of pain on my body”. Removing the original source of the pain for a few months had altered this process of neuroplasticity enough to make a lasting difference to the amount of pain she experienced, even after the trigger in her foot returned.
