Burning. Aching. Shooting. Whatever form it takes, chronic pain can defy treatment. New insights into the causes are leading to fresh ideas for combating it
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“Make sure you stop at the grocery store, not Burger King,” Jama bond instructed her husband on his cell phone as he made an ice-cube run one night in 2012. “Their ice cubes melt too fast.” Bond, then 38 and nearly nine months pregnant, needed bags of ice to keep the water cold in the tub at her feet, which were red, swollen and painful. She had learned to cover them with trash bags so the ice water would not damage her skin. A few months before, Bond had been a healthy young woman with an office job at a company that installs solar panels, living a more or less normal life. Now she barely left the comfort of the water bath, except to shower, “which was torture.”
Bond, who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., was suffering from a condition called erythromelalgia (EM)—Greek for “red limb pain”—in which the hands or feet develop severe burning pain, becoming exquisitely sensitive to even mildly warm temperatures or light pressure. For most patients, like Bond, the condition arises without explanation (it has no known link to pregnancy). Although EM is rare, striking only about 13 in a million people, chronic pain in its myriad forms is astonishingly common and often has mystifying origins.
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