Zulfiqar Rana, MD, MPH, FACP

From TIME: Pain is the human bodyguard, the cop on the beat racing to the scene, sirens wailing, shutting down traffic. You\’ve been cut, burned, broken: pay attention, stop the bleeding, apply heat, apply cold, do something. It\’s one of life\’s most primitive mechanisms, by which even the simplest creature, if it has anything like a central nervous system, learns to avoid danger, stay out of bad neighborhoods, hunker down to give itself time to heal. Pain is protective. Don\’t do that, it commands — and the command is usually a wise one. So this sensation we seek most to avoid is in fact one of the most essential ones for our survival.But what happens when pain goes rogue, when it sends off false alarms so that all the

via Healing the Hurt – TIME.