DOCTORS and nurses know that some people find pain harder to endure than others. Now brain scans of people exposed to exactly the same source of pain have provided the first proof that this is so – and also suggests that how much something hurts really is “all in the mind”.
“We saw a huge variation between responses to the same stimulus,” says project leader Bob Coghill of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “The message is: trust what patients are telling you,” he says.
Coghill tested the pain tolerance of 17 healthy volunteers by applying…
