Join Mark Hutchinson discussing the One Thing he wants people challenged by pain to know about. Explore the current state of pain science research and clinical practice in this straight-to-the-point interview with Mark.
About Mark Hutchinson
Professor Mark Hutchinson is a Professor within the Adelaide Medical School and is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics. Mark’s research has implicated the brain immune-like cells in the action of drugs of dependence and the negative side effects of pain treatments. Find out more about Mark here.
Transcript
Mark, what’s the one thing you want people suffering from persistent pain to know about?
That life and biology is more non-linear than you think.
What I mean by that is the non-linearity means you don’t simply fit into one group. There is not a type. There are multitude of types. And the path your body has taken and you are going to take between A and B is not necessarily a straight one.
And I think that’s both exciting and scary because if we knew how to do it and we had this number of people still experiencing unremitting pain then we failed. And biology has failed, but I think we haven’t understood it yet. So there’s actually a great opportunity to now go forward with non-linear biology in mind to actually find the solutions.
In light of the “less-syllables-challenge we heard earlier”, I’m interested in (because you could have said a million different things then) – why did you choose that as your ‘one thing’?
Because I think embedded within that is hope, because we don’t understand it yet. And hope is an extremely powerful thing to be able to give as a fundamental scientist to pain consumers. The hope is that if we do our jobs better to understand more about the complexity, solutions are not far away.
Fantastic. Please thank Mark!