Ending Chronic Pain: Rebuilding the Brain’s Brakes

Send us Fan Mail For over a century, people living with chronic pain and clean scans were told the same thing: "it's all in your head." A new 2026 study in Current Biology — "Mu opioid receptors gate the locus coeruleus pain generator," from the McCall and Al-Hasani labs at Washington University in St. Louis — suggests they were right, and that it means the opposite of what the dismissal implied. In this deep dive, we explore the locus coeruleus: a cluster of neurons smaller than a grain of r...