Nick: The CDC says chronic pain affects more than 50 million Americans.

Persistent pain that lasts beyond a typical recovery period can be the pellet hating.

Finding the right treatment is a challenge pretty recent study could provide a glimmer of hope.

Ali rogin recently spoke with Pam belluck, health and science reporter for the New York Times.

>> Thank you so much for joining us.

Before we jump in, I'd like to play a collection of interviews we did with people living in chronic pain from across the country.

>> It ranges from things as being as simple as, you know, having something like back pain that you may experience on a daily basis, to literally not being able to get out of bed, to be able to brush your teeth.

>> The simple act of driving to work makes the commute extremely painful.

>> I start my mornings, you know, assessing which joint needs to kind of be put back in place.

And then my day goes from there.

>> Even today, I've had a seven out of 10 migraine all day today, I still got up, I still did my errands.

And it's something that people living in chronic pain are just forced to do.

>> I have had to cancel outings on weekends, local trips around the area, just for the simple fact of waking up and rolling out of bed and realizing that that day was just going to be tylenol and couch and ice and heat and hope for the best.

>> I look totally fine but I'm dealing with an invisible illness.

And that's very frustrating because I'm in a lot of pain but I mask it.

>> You know, you might see someone suffering in public and they could very easily be hiding it because they just have to, but also sometimes it's not possible to do that.

It's a unique kind of torture.

>>The sort of guilt and shame, at least I feel, of questioning, you know, could I have avoided some of these injuries or was I just built to be broken?

>> I was very active, I was a swimmer, I rode my bike, I played sports, and now I can't do any of those things.

And it took a long time for me to mourn that loss and accept what my new life was, especially at my younger age.

>> It was very difficult to experience chronic pain as a child, and I didn't really understand what it was that was going on.

I just knew that I was in pain all the time and that I didn't feel good, and nobody would believe me that I did not feel good.

And it led to a lot of really bad mental health problems because I just wanted the pain to stop.

>> Some of that is really hard to hear.

You've been speaking to people who suffer every day.

Why is chronic pain so difficult to treat?

>> Yeah those were really, , really moving.

I've heard many people expressing similar things.

It can just be really debilitating for people.

It is hard to treat because it has a tremendous amount of variation.

It's very individualized, lots of different causes.

There's not kind of a single point in the brain or even in the body for many people that can actually be treated.

There's no kind of center of pain.

So, you know, a lot of the medications that we have don't work for everybody.

The other methods that we like spinal cord stimulators or nerve blocks, they help some people, but they just don't for everybody.

>> You looked at a trial that was done.

It was a very small trial, but potentially groundbreaking.

What did you learn about it?

>> Yeah.

This was a clinical trial that was looking at an approach called deep brain stimulation.

And what deep brain simulation is, it involves implanting electrodes in the brain and using those electrodes to deliver pulses of electrical stimulation.

These researchers said let's see if we can try it in a different way.

Usually deep brain stimulation involves putting the electrodes in one area or two areas in the brain and then turning on the stimulation and just kind of setting it and forgetting it.

And so, it's on continuously.

But these researchers, their idea was maybe that doesn't work for people with chronic pain because there isn't one or two specific locations in the brain that are gonna work for everybody.

And maybe if we have it on all the time, the brain adapts to it and then it just sort of stops working for people.

So what they did is they spent a lot of time trying to identify in a small number of patients, the specific brain locations that would respond to their pain when their pain was at its worst.

They created these algorithms using ai.

And then they implanted the electrodes in those locations .

And so, it kind of operated like a thermostat for the brain where it was responding to the patient's pain signals.

Giving that burst of stimulation, turning it off, and then the next time they were in pain, it would do the same.

>> What did the experts you spoke to say about the potential for broader application of this particular therapy?

>> So, I think that's a really open question.

This technique itself obviously right now is invasive.

It's expensive.

So, in the form that it is in right now, and of course it's not yet approved, it would be hard to scale it up to help a whole lot of people.

But as one of the researchers I talked to said, you know, if you think of this like a pacemaker for the brain, which is what this technology is often referred to, pacemakers for the heart, you know decades ago were also very expensive and invasive and people didn't know how widely they could be used.

So, I think that as you know we learn more and as the technology becomes more accessible, there is potential for it to be used for more patients.

The other kind of crucial thing, though, is that studies like this, particularly where they're trying to look at individual hallmarks and markers of pain in the brain, they can teach scientists a lot about how pain works, and that can lead to other kind of less invasive, less expensive methods of treatment.

Part of this is to really help scientists understand this very complex and individualized condition.

>> Pam belluck with the New York Times, fascinating reporting.

Thank you so much.

>> Thank you.

♪