Williams, a former KL2/K12 scholar with NC TraCS, began her career as a veterinarian—but is now studying pain in both animals and humans.
Pain is a tricky thing to measure. Unlike metrics such as blood pressure, heart rate or even cancer presence—all of which can be assessed with a test—diagnosing pain relies almost entirely on the use of descriptive language. A patient may tell a clinician, for example, that they’re feeling a “stabbing” or “burning” pain in their stomach, or behind their ears, which might be “diffuse” or “localized” or even “lingering.”
But while this quasi-literary method works well enough with most patients, it’s nearly useless for patients who can’t speak at all. Morika Williams, an assistant professor at the UNC School of Medicine and a former KL2/K12 scholar with the North Carolina Clinical and Translational Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, has been thinking about this problem for a long time.
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