The thing about pain ...

… is that it’s not all bad. The chronic pain that keeps millions from a good night’s sleep is different from the sharp pangs that warn you not to keep your hand on a hot stove.

But for the drug industry, desperate to craft therapies that can relieve pain without the risk of addiction, how do you weave a treatment that blunts chronic agony without dampening the useful kind?

“This is a big question, and I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to it,” said Sulayman Dib-Hajj, a neuroscience researcher at Yale University. “If there were, we would have better drugs on the market right now.”

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