Pain

When her labor pain got worse, April Halprin Wayland could have asked for medication. Instead, she lowered herself into a 4x6-foot bathtub at the Family Birthing Center of Upland and let the warm water reduce her feeling of pain. An hour later, still in the tub, she gave birth to 8-pound, 5-ounce Jeffrey. The baby was whisked to the surface immediately by her obstetrician, Dr. Michael J. Rosenthal, and Wayland cuddled him before stepping out of the tub to join her husband, Gary, who had been at her side during the six-hour labor.

Sooner or later, love usually ends up hurting. But in its early, blissful throes, it actually lessens pain ? at least of the physical kind. That's the finding, reported Wednesday, of a study by pain scientists and a psychologist who studies love. The study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, sprang from a meeting of minds between Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, a longtime researcher of the science of love, and Dr. Sean Mackey, a pain scientist at Stanford University.

When Rebecca Soni took down one of the hallowed barriers in swimming - becoming the first woman to go under 2 minutes and 20 seconds in the 200-meter breaststroke - the moment resonated on multiple levels. Not only did her star turn come on the world stage, at the London Olympics, the modest Soni became the first American swimmer to repeat a gold-medal performance in the breaststroke, winning in 2:19.59. Four years prior, Soni upset the heavily favored Leisel Jones of Australia to own the podium at the Beijing Olympics in the 200 breaststroke.

Painful arthritis of the knee is on the rise — as is the number of middle-aged people who refuse to let the condition interfere with their favorite sports or exercise. Active people in their 40s and 50s are challenging doctors to provide treatments that not only keep them walking but keep them running and jumping as well. Joints rely on slippery caps of cartilage that allow bones to glide past each other with a minimum of friction. "It's the smoothest material known to man," says Dr. Andrew Spitzer, director of the joint replacement program at the Cedars-Sinai Orthopaedic Center in Los Angeles.

Like a jab in the arm with a red-hot poker, social rejection hurts. Literally. A new study finds that our brains make little distinction between the sting of being rebuffed by peers -- or by a lover, boss or family member -- and the physical pain that arises from disease or injury. The new findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Columbia University and the University of Colorado put 40 individuals who were brokenhearted by a recent breakup into a brain scanner and watched as each dumpee gazed upon a photo of his or her dumper and pondered the hurt he or she felt at having been spurned.

An angel's push is what Marjorie calls it. It happened on a weekday afternoon in June 2010. I phoned home and found my wife's voice uncharacteristically distraught. The trembling in her breath was unnerving. "What's the matter?" I asked. "I just took a tumble down the stairs," she replied. Though she was in pain, she was able to get up and walk. Nevertheless, I sped home and called our chiropractor. He insisted that Marjorie have an X-ray so that he could determine if there were any bones broken.

After years as a slave to heroin, Craig Einhorn feared that he would never get clean--let alone in a single day. Even though he was on methadone, he was spending as much as $800 a day on the street to buy more drugs just to keep from getting sick. As his weight ballooned to 265 pounds, his vital signs were heading toward zero. And then he got busted. Facing charges of possession with intent to distribute, "I had two choices: jail or death," said Einhorn, 39, a Miami meat cutter.

Across cultures and language divides, people talk about the sting of social rejection as if it were a physical pain. We feel "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "crushed" when a loved one fails us, "heartache" when spurned by a lover. There's a reason for that linguistic conflation, says a growing community of pain researchers: In our brains too, physical and social pain share much the same neural circuitry. In many ways, in fact, your brain may scarcely make a distinction between a verbal and physical insult.

Unless there is some recognized analgesic effect of rolling a joint, lighting it up and deeply inhaling the by-products of marijuana combustion, then it stands to reason that you could distill the psychoactive ingredient of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol, and formulate it into, say, a capsule. Doing so would combine the relief that comes with smoked marijuana with the ease of a pill and the quality control that comes with approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Poof! Up in smoke goes the debate about medical marijuana.

Hope Rising (yes, her real name) says that the day she watched her husband pull out of their driveway for the last time, she collapsed, clutching her stomach in pain. That was, she says, in March 2012, a day before the couple's seventh wedding anniversary. Rising says she begged him not to go, and after he left, she couldn't get out of bed for days, though she rarely slept. "Usually I'd just lie in bed and stare at the wall or the ceiling," Rising, 47, said. "I was angry that he left, and then I'd think about what I could have done differently for him not to leave.