Recent years have witnessed a large number of failed analgesic drug trials, and in the subsequent soul-searching, 2 potential (and likely mutually exclusive) explanations have gained traction: either that clinical trials are failing to show efficacy of actually effective compounds, or that preclinical pain science's almost exclusive focus on reflexive withdrawal measures has failed to accurately model clinical pain, leading to the development of largely ineffective compounds.A solution to the latter problem is to instead measure "spontaneous pain," and a number of new methodologies to accomplish this have been recently developed or rediscovered. In his Focus Article, my colleague Gary Bennett examines the concept of spontaneous pain, and advances the highly intriguing notion that what we call spontaneous pain might actually be temporally summated hyper-sensitivity (allodynia and hyperalgesia) from activities of daily life.
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