{"id":7264,"date":"2024-10-02T14:24:13","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T18:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/neuroscience\/?p=7264"},"modified":"2024-10-02T14:26:12","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T18:26:12","slug":"morika-williams-is-demystifying-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/neuroscience\/morika-williams-is-demystifying-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Morika Williams is Demystifying Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Williams, a former KL2\/K12 scholar with NC TraCS, began her career as a veterinarian\u2014but is now studying pain in both animals and humans.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Pain is a tricky thing to measure. Unlike metrics such as blood pressure, heart rate or even cancer presence\u2014all of which can be assessed with a test\u2014diagnosing pain relies almost entirely on the use of descriptive language. A patient may tell a clinician, for example, that they&#8217;re feeling a &#8220;stabbing&#8221; or &#8220;burning&#8221; pain in their stomach, or behind their ears, which might be &#8220;diffuse&#8221; or &#8220;localized&#8221; or even &#8220;lingering.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But while this quasi-literary method works well enough with most patients, it&#8217;s nearly useless for patients who can&#8217;t speak at all.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/pathology\/directory\/morikaw\/\">Morika Williams<\/a>, an assistant professor at the UNC School of Medicine and a former\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/tracs.unc.edu\/index.php\/services\/education\/ctsa-k12\">KL2\/K12 scholar<\/a>\u00a0with the North Carolina Clinical and Translational Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, has been thinking about this problem for a long time.<\/p>\n<p>Original article continued <a href=\"https:\/\/tracs.unc.edu\/index.php\/news-articles\/2258-morika-williams-is-demystifying-pain\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Williams, a former KL2\/K12 scholar with NC TraCS, began her career as a veterinarian\u2014but 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\u2014all of which can be assessed with a test\u2014diagnosing pain relies almost entirely on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/neuroscience\/morika-williams-is-demystifying-pain\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Morika Williams is Demystifying Pain\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7858,"featured_media":7268,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","odd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Morika Williams is Demystifying Pain | UNC Neuroscience Center<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/neuroscience\/morika-williams-is-demystifying-pain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Morika Williams is Demystifying Pain | UNC Neuroscience Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Williams, a former KL2\/K12 scholar with NC TraCS, began her career as a veterinarian\u2014but is now studying pain in both animals and humans. Pain is a tricky thing to measure. 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