Monday, Oct. 30, 2023 - How your brain handles pain

😎 High 11C

Good morning!

When I was a kid, there were two main options for trick-or-treating on Halloween. Option 1 was the traditional approach, where we bounced from house to house in a neighbourhood in town. Option 2, though, was my favourite: we would put our costumes on and be driven around to older neighbours who wanted trick or treaters but lived in rural areas. Sometimes they had hot chocolate for us, or fresh cookies or brownies. Those were the best Halloweens.

Do you have a favourite trick-or-treating style? Let us know in the poll below!

– Grace

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 You can check DriveBC’s highway cameras here: Highway 1 (Fraser Valley) | Highway 7 (Silverdale) | Coquihalla Summit | Fraser Canyon at Yale | Highway 3 at Allison Pass/Manning Park 

NEWS

Pain and the brain

Pain is in your head—but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Pain is the result of a series of complex bodily processes that have evolved over time. We might feel it in a certain part of our body, but pain is a brain activity—one that detects injury or danger and translates it into a painful sensation.

It is, in part, designed to spark action. It’s what teaches us not to jump off buildings, touch a burning stove, or bash your head into that tree. Usually you can trust your pain. If your hand feels like it has been stabbed with a pointed object, it probably has been. But sometimes the brain messes up and gets things wrong, sending a person painful sensations even when the body itself has recovered.

A famous example of such brain misfires is phantom pain—the phenomenon of an amputee experiencing pain that feels like it’s coming from an appendage that is missing. A much more common brain miscue causes many forms of chronic pain—the recurrence of painful symptoms months or years after an injury has occurred and healed.

Traditional treatments for chronic pain are often ineffective, in large part because there is often no physical cause—no immediate impact on muscles and tissue. But in recent years, scientists have created a new way to understand chronic pain—one that looks much more closely not at the place that hurts, but at the place that processes pain signals: the brain. 

As they do so, scientists like the University of the Fraser Valley’s Dr. Cynthia Thomson are using their understanding of the brain to find new ways to treat forms of chronic pain. And patients themselves are increasingly being put in the driver seat, in part because of evidence showing that just knowing how pain works can help reduce it.

• Today, Tyler writes about pain, the brain, and how local researchers hope Fraser Valley residents can inform a new generation of treatment.

Related

Contest!

The Bigger Than Me podcast is hosting a live show featuring musician Rebecca Sichon, food, and beverages Nov. 2 at Cowork Chilliwack and we have two tickets to give away to a lucky Current Insider member. To enter, just fill out your name and email here. We will randomly pick a winner and contact them by email Monday afternoon. You can also purchase tickets here.

Back from the dead?

With Halloween upon us, catch up with this spooky story, in which the mayor of Chilliwack catches a real-life ghost.

Need to Know

🐶 New rules will require Mission kennels to keep their pups not too cool, and not too hot [Mission Record]

🐐 Four goats went on the lam in Abbotsford, but were apprehended [Abbotsford News]

👉 A new commercial outlet on Sema:th First Nation will provide new homes for both Field House Brewing and Octavia Brewing [Abbotsford News]

👍 Langley students and their families donated more than 16 tonnes of clothes to a firefighters’ charity [Langley Advance Times]

💉 The union representing prison guards says a recent overdose in a Fraser Valley prison shows needle exchanges pose a danger [Chek News]

🥾 Vedder River Campground will get a half-million dollars for facility upgrades [Chilliwack Progress]

🧀 How a Langley farm turned their cheese into a major attraction [Langley Advance Times]

⛳ Golfer Nick Taylor donated $35,000 to help an Abbotsford anti-gang program [Archway Community Services]

🚑 One person was taken to hospital after the collision that led a fireworks trailer to explode near Hope Thursday [CBC]

🏙️ UFV's new Bachelor of Regional and Community Planning program opens doors for local talent, ending the reliance on outside urban planners for the Fraser Valley region. Read more about this program’s impact.*

*Sponsored Listing

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The Agenda

‘A hell of a DNF’

Ihor Verys doesn't quit easily. Between Saturday and Wednesday evening, the Chilliwack ultra-marathoner ran more than 700km at an event in the United States. In doing so, he and another competitor set a new world record for backyard ultras, a unique form of the sport where runners complete laps until there is only one person standing. (The Current interviewed Verys earlier this year. You can read that piece and learn more about Backyard Ultras here.)   

Eventually on Wednesday, Verys finally stopped, citing his health and saying he was happy to take the “assist” on competitor Harvey Lewis’s victory at Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in Short Creek, Tennessee. 

“It was a great adventure,” Verys said in a speech broadcast on YouTube. “I’ve never seen so many cameras around. You made me feel like a superstar.”

“Not too many of those,” an organizer told Verys. “It’s a DNF, but it’s a hell of a good DNF. There has been no better DNF in the history of Backyard Ultra.”

🗓 Things to do

🍭 Trick-or-treat: Downtown Abbotsford’s Halloween Treat Trail will run again this year on Tuesday, Oct. 31. Kids can trick-or-treat from business to business. Find details online.

🍬 Trick-or-treat: Downtown Mission’s trick or treat event will run on Tuesday, Oct. 31. Kids can trick-or-treat down 1st Avenue. Details online.

👩‍🔬 Climate class: The Mission Library is hosting a STEAM Wednesday on Nov. 1 where kids ages 8 to 12 can design climate-friendly towns. Registration required; sign up online.

Have an event to tell us about? Fill out this form to have it highlighted here.

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