The subjectivity of pain means that one person's kidney stones may be another's childbirth, but most sources of pain do have objective, underlying causes.

Learn about the point of the physical and emotional experience of pain, which has three broad categories that help determine treatment approaches.

Researchers have investigated the benefits of extreme pain rituals, exploring how and why we engage in these events when humans generally naturally avoid pain and perceive it as a negative experience.

Explore the biology of pain and why the experience of pain may differ widely from one person to another.

Skull bone marrow may be playing a key role in chronic pain.

A famous philosophical question asks would you opt for a life with no pain—but without reality.

Your favorite music can minimize physical pain, according to a 2025 study on how music can bring solace and address pain.

Listen to an amputee describe what it was like in the aftermath of his partial foot amputation and how his chronic, extreme pain fueled his depression and his decision to attempt to alleviate the pain with the radical surgery.

Overuse of opioids can lead to hypersensitivity to pain.

Opioids are a class of drugs including fentanyl, heroin, oxycodone, and more.

Doctors ignored women's pain as a nurse replaced their fentanyl with saline

This five-part podcast series, produced by Serial Productions, focuses on the experiences of women undergoing fertility treatments at a Yale clinic where a nurse secretly replaced pain medication with saline solution. This led to women experiencing excruciating pain during procedures, but the clinic downplayed or ignored their complaints.

Phantom limbs aren't just limited to limbs—there are phantom breasts, teeth, and more, and these sensations are often painful.

Surgery before the dawn of anesthesia

The arc toward anesthetics was painfully slow, with early pain mitigation offerings ranging from analgesics—drugs that dim pain but don't block it—and numbing surgical sites with cold water to gassing patients with carbon dioxide or bashing or bleeding them unconscious. Such treatments and the torturous surgery they preceded led many to avoid even life-saving procedures, and those who survived often kept silent about the trauma.

See what analysis of one man's amputated leg, donated to The Bone Museum, tells us about his otherwise invisible pain.

There is no cure for arthritis, which includes more than 100 separate joint pain and stiffness conditions.

Phantom limb pain may often match the pain or contortion of the injury that led to the limb loss.

Theories vary on why we love to eat spicy food—even when it hurts.

Opioids mimic naturally produced endorphins to dull pain.

Mosquitoes top the ranking of the world's deadliest animals.

Food poisoning can sometimes cause serious long-term health issues

Although foodborne illness can be relatively mild and cause short-term discomfort, more rarely it can also cause long-term severe health consequences, depending on your individual risk factors, the severity of your sickness, and the care you receive. Kidney failure is one serious complication associated with certain types of food poisoning. Meningitis, hepatitis, arthritis, and pancreatitis are also rare and serious foodborne illness complications. If a pregnant person gets food poisoning, it can cause health issues for the fetus.

Opium is a milky liquid substance extracted from unripe poppy plant seeds

It's been used for ages to reduce pain and induce euphoria, both of which are side effects of the plant's alkaloids—nitrogen-based compounds with pronounced physical effects. Isolating and synthesizing derivatives of these naturally occurring chemicals enabled the invention of morphine, heroin, and other opioids.

Dengue is sometimes called 'breakbone fever' because it's so painful

Though this mosquito-transmitted disease can be asymptomatic, in more severe cases patients experience high fever, muscle spasms, and joint pain. The experience can be so excruciating that it feels like the patient's bones are broken, thus the nickname of breakbone fever. It's the world's fastest spreading tropical disease.

Where you fall on the sports misery index

Only one team can win it all each season, which means the majority of fans are disappointed. This bot mines the data on how your teams have performed in recent years and measures your misery index (the higher, the more miserable).

Breaking down the knee's anatomy

The human knee is a remarkably complex structure carrying the full weight of the body throughout a person's life while allowing a number of complex twists, flexes, and extensions. It's also one of the body's biggest weaknesses—the location of chronic pain and replacement surgeries for millions of Americans.

Headache disorders have historically been neglected and under-researched

Confusion between the variety of headaches—from mild discomfort to debilitating pain—and gender bias—migraines primarily affect women—have led to widespread misunderstandings of the medical issue. Medical students in the US may get as little as 30 minutes of instruction on the three major types: migraines, cluster headaches, and tension-type headaches.

She can't feel pain, hunger, or danger

Olivia Farnsworth, born with a rare chromosome 6p deletion, may be the only person known to lack pain, hunger, and fear responses. This overview explores her unique condition, the incredible incidents that revealed it, and how scientists hope her case could unlock new insights into human survival and sensory systems.

When common sounds become disturbing

Misophonia causes certain sounds to feel violating, triggering a "very visceral kind of experience" filled with extremely unpleasant emotions, including annoyance, anger, and disgust. A 2017 study found that people with misophonia have elevated activity in the brain's anterior insula—a region associated with interoception, emotional processing, and behavioral responses—when exposed to trigger sounds. Ongoing research suggests trigger sound context affects the severity and manifestation of the condition.

Explore the gap in what Americans die from versus news coverage on death causes

Top killers like heart disease, stroke, and liver disease, though they represent a significant burden nationally, are not often extensively covered in the media.

Over 28% of US adults use yoga for pain management.

Arthritis is an umbrella term for various conditions that cause joint pain, including osteoarthritis, inflammatory arthritis, posttraumatic arthritis, and septic (infectious) arthritis.

Marina Abramović subjected herself to pain and humiliation in her ‘Rhythm’ series

The five performances, which included an invitation for the audience to use 72 objects as they pleased, helped put her on the map as a fearless artist, but they also caused her physical harm.

Listen to why thousands of donated human kidneys are thrown away annually, even as thousands of people are awaiting a kidney transplant.

Animal phobias are likely the most common type of phobias, followed by an extreme fear of heights.

Which organs can you live without?

While there are some organs (such as the heart) that people simply can’t live without, there are other organs that can be removed without a huge impact. Patients who have their appendix removed, for example, experience no changes to their daily...

How does cancer actually kill someone?

While the emotional and physical tolls of cancer are often clear, the innerworkings of how cancer kills can be confusing — and terrifying to discuss. Here, oncologists explain how cancer can progress.

Endurance art strains and exhausts the body

Artists like Marina Abramović are known for testing the limits of human endurance. Endurance art can involve carrying heavy objects or posing uncomfortably for long durations. (This resource contains some artistic depictions of violence.)

Autoimmune disorders are one of the top 10 killers of young and middle-aged women

Studies in the US and the UK, though conducted decades ago, have underscored that autoimmune diseases, when grouped together, are a top killer of women.

Extreme heat puts people at risk of developing kidney stones

It's essential to remain hydrated in summer weather to keep your body healthy, but one reason is to help dilute minerals that naturally build up if they aren't excreted in our water-fueled urine. Doctors recommend people generally drink 64 ounces of water a day and also eat foods with salt to help ward off dehydration.

The neuroscience of heartbreak

An analysis of functional MRIs revealed a difficult fact: the active brain areas of people experiencing heartbreak were very similar to those actively in love. This is a major reason why people in the middle of rejection can't accept the reality of their loss. This article breaks down the various changes in neurotransmitters and neural pathways for those enduring that universal experience, heartbreak.

Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from tinnitus

Historical figures that reportedly had the condition include Charles Darwin and Beethoven. Both men wrote letters about the frustrations and pain they experienced from the condition. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

If surgeons removed organs, including one of your lungs, a kidney, your spleen, appendix, tonsils, part of your liver, and even some of your reproductive organs, you could still survive.

Migrane 101: data, symptoms, and treatments

Living with migraine, however often the neurological condition attacks, is a journey fraught with pain and isolation. This migraine guide offers insight into the condition, common triggers, possible treatments, personal stories, and tips for managing life with migraine.

America's top causes of death are heart disease, cancer, accidents, and stroke

Heart disease killed more than 680,000 people in 2023 and cancer killed around 613,000 people that year. Both causes of death are far above the next leading cause of death—accidents, which numbered around 223,000. Provisional data for 2024 indicates the leading causes of death remained the same.

White patients waited 374 days for a kidney—Black patients waited 727 days

A 2022 congressionally mandated report highlighted racial inequities in the US organ transplant system, including disparities that made it more likely white people will be placed on organ wait lists than Black people. It spotlighted inequities such as racial differences in median kidney wait times identified in earlier research. The report, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, recommended fixes including that the Department of Health and Human Services develop national performance goals for the system and achieve equity in the system in the next five years.

Misophonia is a neurological disorder where sounds trigger strong emotions

The phenomenon is characterized by decreased tolerance to specific sounds, such as heavy breathing, pen clicking, and water dripping, which trigger a fight-or-flight response. The resulting emotions, which can range from irritation and disgust to anxiety and fear, can be overwhelming and uncontrollable.

Trauma-related amputations are primarily from falls, then car accidents and related traumas, followed by mechanical forces according to analysis based on global burden of disease data in 2017.

When humans perceive touch, the information is sent to the thalamus and then to the primary somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that receives sensory input.

A psychiatrist warns that chasing happiness can lead to misery

Rafa Euba, a retired consultant psychiatrist, argues that happiness is a vague and abstract concept that is hard to quantify. He suggests accepting that suffering and pain are a normal part of life. An attainable goal for one's life is to attempt to minimize pain, and pursue balance and contentment rather than a false ideal of permanent bliss.

Geneva, Switzerland, has some of the highest grocery prices worldwide

Other cities that made the top 20 on the list of the global cities with the highest grocery prices around the world include Boston, Hong Kong, and Toronto, at least as of 2025.

New drugs called Gepants have been shown to improve the quality of life of many sufferers.

Journalist Eva Wiseman has had migraines since childhood. Beginning with a yawn they segue into visual auras before turning into severe pain. As it so happened, she experienced a migraine during the course of her interview with Dr. Peter Goadsby, a pioneer in understanding and treating migraines as well as getting the world to treat them seriously.

The Cincinnati Enquirer's Pulitzer-winning look at the opioid epidemic

Synthetic opioids kill someone in the US every 16 minutes. Communities across the country have been ravaged by deaths, overdoses, jail time, and babies born with drug-related medical problems as opioid abuse became a typical feature of many American towns. This seven-part exposé provides an inside look at the effect in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.