EEG Test Provides More Effective Way to Measure Pain

Guest: Carl Saab, Professor of Neurosurgery, Brown University, Director of the Pain & Neural Circuits Center research lab, Rhode Island Hospital. Chronic pain is among the thorniest problems in medicine. It affects 1 in 6 American adults and we simply don’t have very effective treatment for it. That’s one reason overuse of opioids has become such an epidemic problem. We also don’t have very good ways of diagnosing pain other than the “rate your pain on a scale of 1-10” method, which scientists agree is not very scientific.