Best Way to Measure Pain? Just Ask

June 24 -- — When Cynthia Toussaint went from ballerina to bed-ridden, she believes one reason was that doctors wouldn't believe her about the pain she was experiencing.

Toussaint suffered undiagnosed for 13 years with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD, a disease resulting in chronic pain due to nerve damage. She developed the condition after a minor ballet injury, and it escalated into pain so severe that she was unable to get out of bed, walk, or speak for 10 years.

"All my doctors told me that my problems were in my head. One doctor told me to shoot myself," recalls Toussaint, who has since co-founded For Grace, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about RSD. People with chronic pain, observes Toussaint, are "not believed. We're abandoned."

Now new research backs Toussaint up — subjective response to painful stimuli is an accurate indication of pain experienced, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, researchers divided 17 healthy adults into two groups: those sensitive to pain stimuli and those less sensitive to the same stimuli. Using magnetic resonance imaging, brain activity was monitored in each group during application of a heat stimulus.

For pain-sensitive subjects, more frequent activity was observed in the cerebral cortex — which plays a significant role in the pain process — as compared to individuals less sensitive to pain.

"The hard data indicates that individuals are capable of looking into their own experience and reporting pain levels accurately," says lead author Robert C. Coghill, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The Truth of 'Ouch!'

The finding should prompt physicians "to be more sympathetic to pain patients," suggests Dr. Joshua Prager, clinical assistant professor and director of the California Pain Medicine Center at the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles. "Most physicians do a fairly poor job in that regard."