{"id":141613,"date":"2025-09-08T12:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T12:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/141613\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T12:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T12:13:11","slug":"experimental-brain-stimulation-may-help-turn-off-the-fire-alarm-of-chronic-pain-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/141613\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimental brain stimulation may help turn off the \u2018fire alarm\u2019 of chronic pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE:\u00a0 Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta\u2019s new book<\/a>, \u201cIt Doesn\u2019t Have to Hurt,\u201d is available now. Watch \u201cDr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: It Doesn\u2019t Have to Hurt.\u201d at 9 p.m. ET on September 7 on CNN.<\/p>\n

Edward Mowery lived with excruciating pain for years: Picture being put into a hot frying pan, he said, and then someone holding you down on that pan forever. The fiery, shooting pain got so bad that he quit his job, stopped playing sports and had to abandon his beloved death metal band just as the group was taking off.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt one point, I didn\u2019t have any feeling in my arms or hands or anything,\u201d said Mowery, 55, who lives in New Mexico. \u201cI couldn\u2019t put one note on a guitar, much less play like I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

But everything changed when doctors tried a cutting-edge approach to pain management. If they can refine the technique to make it less intrusive and demonstrate that it works on others, doctors think this technique could radically transform the way people manage debilitating and otherwise untreatable chronic pain \u2014 no opioids or pain blockers required.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state of the art right now for picking a medication for an individual patient is trial and error\u201d when it comes to pain, said Dr. Prasad Shirvalkar,<\/a> a neurologist at the University of California San Francisco. \u201cTrying to be your own guinea pig, that\u2019s essentially what we\u2019re doing right now in pain medicine.\u201d Finding something more precise that could stop a pain signal in the brain before it could be felt in the body would be a huge shift.<\/p>\n

An estimated 50 million adults<\/a> in the United States experience chronic pain, defined as lasting for more than three months. Of them, about 8.5% are like Mowery, living with chronic pain that interferes with day-to-day life, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/p>\n

Edward Mowery and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta walk through Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico. – CNN<\/p>\n

Years of agony<\/p>\n

Mowery says he was a rambunctious kid and got injured a lot while skiing and playing soccer.<\/p>\n

Altogether he says he\u2019s had 34 surgeries, including 11 painful knee surgeries, as well as foot, back and neck surgeries. The bigger problem, though, started with a part of his body that hadn\u2019t even been injured.<\/p>\n

About a week after a routine knee replacement in 2009, his right foot started to feel like it was on fire.<\/p>\n

He spoke with \u201call kind of doctors, trying to figure out what was going on,\u201d but nobody could explain the pain. Some didn\u2019t even believe that he was in pain, assuming he was an opioid addict looking for pills. \u201cThat\u2019s the one thing, when they put me on all these meds, I wasn\u2019t addicted to all the meds, I was addicted to getting rid of the pain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For eight long years, he said, doctors couldn\u2019t figure out what was causing the pain. But in 2017, when his foot turned purple and black, he went to a pain specialist in Albuquerque who took one look and told him he had complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS.<\/p>\n

CRPS is a kind of neurological<\/a> pain, often in the extremities, that can develop after a surgery, stroke, injury or heart attack that is out of proportion to the severity of an initial injury. It can make blood vessels dilate or constrict, leading to skin discoloration, swelling and temperature changes.<\/p>\n

Mowery says doctors explained that when the acute pain from his knee went away, his brain essentially missed that feeling.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I\u2019d been in pain for so long, my brain was so used to being in pain that it said, \u2018Oh, you need to have this back,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cManufactured pain from the brain with no stimulus. It\u2019s unreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctors put him on a variety of pain medications, including morphine and oxycodone, that he didn\u2019t like because he felt so out of it. At one point, he took 17 pills a day, but nothing worked for long. Always athletic, Mowery ended up relying on a walker or a wheelchair to get around .<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really depressing. You would think they\u2019d call CRPS the suicide disease,\u201d Mowery said. \u201cA lot of times, I was sitting there just going, \u2018what am I going to do? There\u2019s nothing out there for me.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n

He spent years searching the internet for clinical trials and finally found one at the University of California San Francisco<\/a>. The description of the research seemed vague but he filled out the questionnaire anyway and, within 40 minutes, he said, he got a message urgently asking him to come to San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Relief from his years of agony would soon come after doctors persuaded him to let them drill several holes in his head.<\/p>\n

\u2018These are people that have been failed\u2019<\/p>\n

Shirvalkar says he has long wanted to solve the puzzle that is pain. He had success treating neurological conditions but less success treating their chronic pain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are people that have been failed by all available therapies. They\u2019ve tried over 25 different medications. They have had multiple injections and nerve blocks.
They\u2019ve even had spinal cord stimulators or peripheral stimulators, and nothing can alleviate their suffering,\u201d Shirvalkar said. \u201cWe started appreciating that the brain must be generating or perpetuating these pain signals in a person. So the question becomes, how can we identify what these signals are and really try to suppress or short-circuit them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Acute pain, like when someone stubs a toe, affects the brain differently from chronic pain, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of chronic pain as a fire alarm. The alarm is helpful for acute pain. We want to be able to know when there\u2019s an emergency,\u201d he said. \u201cIn chronic pain, it\u2019s as if the fire alarm is going off, but we can\u2019t identify the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

When pain becomes chronic, it rewires the brain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt starts to take on these other dimensions that include mood and motivation and involve attention and memory, and so we really have to address the cognitive aspect of it,\u201d Shirvalkar said. \u201cIt tells me that when someone has developed chronic pain, treating it with a single drug or injection or some monotherapy probably isn\u2019t going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the help of a $7.56 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Shirvalkar and a team at UCSF have been exploring deep brain stimulation<\/a>, a technology sometimes used with people who have Parkinson\u2019s disease, to treat pain conditions like Mowery\u2019s.<\/p>\n

With Parkinson\u2019s, doctors implant electrodes in the brain that produce electrical impulses to disrupt the abnormal signals that cause tremors, stiffness and slow movement. Shirvalkar wondered if they could also use the a version of the device to redirect or suppress the brain\u2019s pain signals to the body.<\/p>\n

There were a few challenges with this approach. The device sends signals around the clock in someone who has Parkinson\u2019s, but Shirvalkar thought a constant signal wouldn\u2019t work for chronic pain because the brain can become acclimated to the impulses and essentially override them.<\/p>\n

Another challenge was figuring out what part of the brain was sending pain signals.
There\u2019s no one central location that does this, and it could be different in different people.<\/p>\n

Yet another challenge would be to quickly sense when the brain was about to send out a pain signal \u2013 or even anticipate it \u2013 and shut it down quickly.<\/p>\n

The team used computational models and AI to essentially detect a biomarker that could track how severe a person\u2019s chronic pain would be, similar to how an A1C level can tell whether someone has diabetes and how severe it is.<\/p>\n

But to learn whether deep brain stimulation could work for pain, the team first had to persuade Mowery that he should have another surgery. He was reluctant to have another procedure. This trial would require three.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A routine knee replacement in 2009 was the beginning of Mowery’s chronic pain journey. – Courtesy Edward Mowery<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The probes implanted in his brain don’t keep him entirely pain-free, but bad days are infrequent. – Courtesy Edward Mowery<\/p>\n

\u2018I feel like I owe him my life\u2019<\/p>\n

It took Mowery about 18 months to decide the trial was right for him \u2013 time in which the worsening pain essentially wore him down.<\/p>\n

In the first surgery, doctors would map Mowery\u2019s brain to determine where the pain came from. Another surgery would remove the temporary probes from the first procedure. A final procedure placed permanent probes in the correct areas.<\/p>\n

For the first part of the trial, Mowery spent 10 days in the hospital while doctors created a grid of more than 100 points on his head to try to find different circuits or certain activation for pain by watching and stimulating his brain. Even with eight- to 10-hour days probing his brain, it wasn\u2019t until day five or six that the researchers had their \u201ceureka moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of a sudden, Ed says, \u2018Wow, my pain just washed off of me,\u2019 \u201d Shirvalkar said. \u201cI was blown away. I didn\u2019t know what to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concerned that it could be the placebo effect, the doctors kept testing to make sure they had the right targets. Shirvalkar quickly became confident that they had picked the right areas when Mowery immediately felt the pain in his feet, legs and lower back dissipate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to actually understanding what\u2019s driving someone\u2019s chronic pain, we say there\u2019s no pain center, right? But it tells us if chronic pain is this complex lock, it tells us that yes, that there is a key to be found. So it gives us hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much more research will be done to see if this technology can work for everyone or whether there would be even better technology that would be less invasive.<\/p>\n

In August, Shirvalkar and his team published<\/a> the results of their tests of this technique on six people. The team followed the patients for 22 months and were even able to randomize the trial so some got the stimulation and some did not. Those who got stimulation reported a reduction in pain of about 60%, while the placebo group got no such relief.<\/p>\n

Mowery has resumed his normal daily activities, including playing his guitar. He can monitor what\u2019s going on in his brain with an iPad app and just has to periodically charge the device that sends the signals to his brain.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not totally pain-free, he says: He\u2019ll have a bad day sometimes, but it\u2019s infrequent.<\/p>\n

He says Shirvalkar\u2019s work changed his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way it detected pain, the way it turns off pain, the way I\u2019m getting off all these medications, I feel like I owe him my life,\u201d Mowery said.<\/p>\n

Mowery felt so much better that, in June, he accompanied Shirvalkar<\/a> to Washington to testify before Congress\u2019 Neuroscience Caucus about the impact of the NIH BRAIN Initiative on addiction research and on this pain treatment alternative.<\/p>\n

Shirvalkar is concerned about future funding amid the current political environment and other funding cuts at the NIH.<\/p>\n

\u201cNIH funding is always a concern. Fortunately, we\u2019re doing OK for the time being,\u201d Shirvalkar said. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to wait and see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mowery hopes that his experience will provide enough of an example so people can see the possibilities of such medical research.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been called a medical astronaut before, and my sister is an actual astronaut, and she finds that funny,\u201d Mowery said. \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDITOR\u2019S NOTE:\u00a0 Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta\u2019s new book, \u201cIt Doesn\u2019t Have to Hurt,\u201d is available now.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1110,1111,88352,3281,88351,88350,97,88353,88354],"class_list":["post-141613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-acute-pain","tag-chronic-pain","tag-complex-regional-pain-syndrome","tag-doctors","tag-dr-prasad-shirvalkar","tag-edward-mowery","tag-health","tag-pain-signal","tag-university-of-california-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}