Montreal Gazette - Montreal conferences tackles wincing issue of pain

Decades after McGill University psychologist Ronald Melzack's pioneer collection of 78 "pain words" became the McGill Pain Questionnaire — burning, stabbing, flickering, pulsing, radiating and nauseating, to name a few — scientists still puzzle over why some people develop chronic pain while others are spared.

About 6,000 leading pain experts gathered in Montreal this week for the 13th World Congress on Pain, dubbed the "Olympics of Pain," said Monday that the mystery continues to deepen.

"A lot of this conference is soul-searching about what's going on in order to make it better," said Jeffrey Mogil, professor of pain studies at McGill and scientific committee chair of the conference. "Ultimately, I think it comes to down to the fact that pain is deeply complex."

A disadvantage of the research, Mogil added, is that "pain is fundamentally subjective and there's no objective way of measuring it."