By Francis X. Shen, Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School

Earlier this month the Supreme Court of New South Wales ruled that an individual who experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the result of an airplane crash could recover damages under the Montreal Convention. The case was important because many courts have previously ruled that PTSD, absent any other “bodily injury,” was not covered by the bodily injury provisions of the international agreement.

The case is illustrative of the way in which courts across the world continue to find a meaningful distinction between “physical” (or “bodily”) injury/pain and “mental” (or “emotional”) injury/pain. Continue reading »

By David Seminowicz, Principal Investigator, Seminowicz Pain Imaging Lab, Department of Neural and Pain Sciences, University of Maryland

A potential difficulty, but also an opportunity, relating to using neuroimaging evidence in legal cases arises from the difficulty brain researchers have in separating emotional and physical pain. We know that pain and emotion are tightly linked. In fact, “emotion” is in the very definition of pain. The IASP definition of pain is: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”  Yet, the legal system deals with “physical” versus “psychiatric” versus “emotional” pain in different ways.

Chronic pain is associated with anxiety, depression, and stress. These factors can exacerbate the pain, and pain can exacerbate them. Pain’s sensory and emotional components connect in a “feed-forward” cycle. It may not be possible to entirely separate the sensory and emotional components of pain, biologically or experientially. But it might be necessary for the purposes of legal cases, as important areas of law create sharp distinctions between physical and emotional, or body and mind.  Continue reading »

By Martha Farah, Director, University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroscience & Society

Neurolaw includes some fascinating issues that lack any practical legal significance – for example whether we should consider anyone responsible for anything they do, given that all behavior is physically caused by brain processes.  It also includes some legally important issues that lack intellectual juiciness – like regulatory issues surrounding neurotechnology.

Thank goodness there are also some issues that combine intellectual fascination with practical legal importance. The Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital recently focused on just such an issue when they convened a meeting of neuroscientists and legal scholars on the brain imaging of pain.

Pain, I learned at this meeting, is at the heart of many legal proceedings. A major problem to be solved in these proceedings is the determination of whether someone is truly in pain. Chronic pain in particular may not have physically obvious causes. There may be clinical and circumstantial evidence of pain – like adhering to a medication regime, seeking surgeries or other interventional procedures, and avoiding pleasurable activities – but often the major evidence of pain is just what someone says that it is. However, the motivation exists to lie about pain – to sue for more money, to obtain disability benefits – and so an objective measure of pain, a “pain-o-meter,” would be helpful.

The “pain-o-meter” is a silly term for a serious idea: the idea of using neuroimaging to assess the likelihood that someone is in pain. In principle it seems pretty straightforward: validate and norm the imaging measures (functional and structural), compare the patient’s values on those measures to the norms, and see how pain-like their values are. Alas, in presentations by an eminent line-up of pain neuroscientists, we learned how far away we currently are from having such validation.  Continue reading »

By Karen Davis, Professor of Neuroscience and Canada Research Chair in Brain and Behaviour, University of Toronto

The prevalence of chronic pain is staggering.  The Institute of Medicine reported in 2011 that 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain – more than those with heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined.  The report also highlights that the annual costs for medical care, lost wages and productivity is more than $600B.  These enormous personal and societal costs of chronic pain has driven an effort to “prove” if and how much pain an individual is suffering from for health care providers, insurance companies and legal actors.  This is challenging because pain is a personal and subjective experience.  Ideally, self report would be sufficient to establish the “ground truth” of the pain experience.

However, some are not able to provide self reports accurately, and the potential financial gain associated with claims of pain has tarnished the perceived authenticity of subjective reports.  This has led some to develop brain imaging-based tests of pain – a so-called “painometer.”  Yet, current technologies are simply not able to determine whether or not someone has chronic pain.  Here, I consider specifically how we could develop a brain-imaging based painometer – and whether we would want to do so.  As we ask: “Can we do it?,” we should always ask, “Is this the right thing to do?”

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By Christopher J. Gilligan and David Borsook | Pain Medicine | July 27, 2015

The dramatic impact of chronic pain was captured in a recent European study that followed patients suffering with chronic pain for 1 year: 40% of those patients had more pain and 40% had less pain, but 100% reported major, negative impacts of chronic pain on their quality of life [1]. Half of patients believed that everything possible had been done to manage their pain. This insight into how patients with chronic pain fare reveals a number of salient points, perhaps most importantly highlighting this condition that persists without cure. Furthermore, accumulating evidence suggests that emotional processing in brain networks is more involved in chronic pain [2] alluding to the nature of the associated suffering with the condition.

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