A New Measure May Unlock The Mysteries Of Pain by Melissa Healy. Los Angeles Times. April 10, 2013.
Key Paragraph point to the clinical implications of the University of Michigan research functional magnetic resonance imaging research into pain:
For medical practice, the implications of this work are far-reaching.
If a clear measure of physical pain could be reliably captured by an imaging machine, patients who are "locked in" to bodies broken by disease or injury could tell their doctors if they hurt -- and what helps. Developers of pain-fighting drugs or devices would have a consistent metric by which to judge the effectiveness of their therapies. Opiate drug-seekers who claim to be in pain could be referred to addiction treatment rather than have their habit fed. Patients with phantom-limb pain, or whose chronic pain is exacerbated by depression, might use the images to guide efforts at pain-suppression
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