Sanjay Gupta

And into that crushed bone and then they blow it up with a balloon to sort of restore the height.

And then they put in a dollop of this substance which hardens into cement to sort of create an internal cast.

And I got to tell you, we weren't sure whether it was going to work in terms of her pain.

But right away, her pain went from I want to die to a 2 or 3 out of 10, which was pretty incredible.

No, that would have been an ethical thing.

Although, you know, I wanted to be right there, you know, to make sure they were taking good care of her and walking that line.

Yeah, this is a fascinating backstory.

I'll tell you real quick.

You'll appreciate.

So I'm working on this book, and I'm really interested in the role of inflammation overall.

And I came across this study that was done by these researchers who were trying to answer the question, who is most likely to develop chronic pain?

And they defined chronic pain as lasting three months or longer every day or six months every other day or so.

And they were measuring inflammation levels.

And the finding that they had, which ended up being really instructive, was the people who had the lowest levels of inflammation at the time of injury were the most likely to have chronic pain.

And I had to absorb that for a second.

So low levels of inflammation at the time of injury were more likely to lead to chronic pain.

And I think for a lot of people, they think of that absolutely backwards.

Like if you're really inflamed at the time of injury, this is just going to be worse.

It's going to last longer.

And they found almost the opposite to be true.