Some People Were Born Feeling No Pain | Empamyth

[00:00:00]Imagine waking up tomorrow and pain simply doesn't exist anymore. Not because you took medicine, not because of an injury that numbs something, it just stopped working for almost everyone on Earth. Picture what that would actually look like. No wincing when you stub your toe in the dark. No pulling your hand back from a hot pan. No sore muscles after a long day. At first, that might sound like a gift, but stick with that thought for a moment because it gets stranger the longer you sit with it.

[00:00:28]That's the world inside a 2022 film called Crimes of the Future, directed by David Cronenberg.

[00:00:34]In this story, most of humanity has evolved past [music] feeling physical pain. The film follows a man named Saul Tenser, whose body grows strange new organs on its own. Organs his partner removes in front of a live audience almost like art. It sounds like pure fiction, but here's what might surprise you. A version of this already exists in real people, right now, alive today. And in January 2025, science took that same idea and turned [music] it into a pill you can actually be prescribed. Stick with me because by the end of this video, you'll understand exactly how losing the ability to feel pain went from a rare medical mystery to a real medicine sitting on pharmacy shelves.

[00:01:13][music] If a story like this pulls you in, go ahead and hit subscribe. We cover ideas [music] exactly like this one all the time. The real discovery. Let's leave the movie behind for a moment and talk about something that actually happened.

[00:01:25]In 2006, a group of researchers traveled to Lahore, Pakistan after hearing about a 10-year-old boy who performed street shows where he walked across burning coals and let people push knives through his arm. He showed no sign of pain at all. Not a flinch. Not a wince.

[00:01:43]Researchers studied him closely along with relatives who shared the same rare trait. What they found changed how doctors understood pain forever.

[00:01:52]The cause traced back to a mutation in a single gene called SCN9A.

[00:01:57]This gene controls a tiny switch in nerve cells known as a sodium channel.

[00:02:01]In people with this mutation, that switch simply never turns on, and pain signals never make it to the brain at all. Think about what that actually means. This wasn't a boy who was simply brave or used to pain. His body physically could not send the warning signal in the first place. To him, walking on hot coals felt no different than walking on cool tile. It's a haunting story because pain usually protects us. It's the reason you pull your hand back from a hot stove before you even think about it. For this boy, and for people who share this same rare condition, that built-in alarm system simply [music] isn't there. What makes this story even more remarkable is that the boy wasn't alone.

[00:02:39]Around the same time, researchers found other small family groups scattered across the world who carried this exact same mutation passed down quietly through generations, most of them unaware that their children's fearlessness as toddlers was tied to a single broken gene. This discovery didn't just explain one boy's condition.

[00:02:56]It quietly opened the door to one of the biggest questions in modern medicine. If pain can be turned off by accident, could scientists learn to turn it off on purpose safely for anyone who needed it?

[00:03:07]Parents raising children with this condition often describe a constant, quiet [music] worry most parents never have to carry. A regular scraped knee is no longer something small to shrug off because there's no crying, no limping, nothing obvious to notice. Families learn to check their child's body regularly, almost like a routine safety check, looking for bruises or injuries their child would never think to mention. The science explained simply, to understand why this discovery mattered so much, it helps to picture how pain normally works inside your body.

[00:03:38]Think of your nerves like a chain of messengers. When something hurts, a signal starts at the site of the injury and travels down that chain, messenger to messenger, until it reaches your brain.

[00:03:49]Your brain is the one that actually registers the feeling of pain. Without that final message arriving, there is no pain, even if the injury is very real.

[00:03:58]The sodium channel scientists identified, called Nav1.7, acts like a gate along that chain.

[00:04:05]Normally, this gate opens and lets the pain signal keep moving forward. In people with the SCN9A mutation, the gate stays shut. The signal starts, but it never finishes the journey. The brain simply never finds out anything happened. Interestingly, this same gene can misbehave in the opposite direction, too.

[00:04:23]In a small number of other families, a different kind of mutation causes the same gate to get stuck wide open instead of shut, leading to bursts of burning pain instead of none at all. Studying both extremes side by side gave scientists a far clearer picture of exactly what this one gate was doing.

[00:04:39]This single discovery gave scientists something they had never had before, real proof inside a real human body, that shutting down one specific gate could remove pain entirely without shutting down anything else, like touch, temperature, or movement. That kind of proof is rare, and it's exactly what drug researchers had been waiting for.

[00:04:58]The race to turn this into medicine.

[00:05:01]Once scientists understood the SCN9A mutation, a new race quietly began. For almost 20 years, multiple drug companies worked to find a way to safely copy that [music] same pain-blocking effect, this time using medicine instead of a rare genetic accident. Here's why this mattered so much. For decades, the strongest pain medications available were opioids.

[00:05:24]Opioids work well, but they carry a serious risk of addiction, and that risk has already cost hundreds of [music] thousands of lives. Turning a genetic discovery into an actual pill is far harder than it sounds. Early attempts to target the same gate ran into problems, some affecting the heart, others simply not precise enough. Year after year, researchers went back to the lab, adjusted their approach, and tried again.

[00:05:47]On January 30th, 2025, that nearly 20-year effort finally reached the finish line. The FDA approved a new medication called Xernabs, known by its generic name suvepaxergine.

[00:05:58]>> [music] >> It was the first new class of pain medication approved in more than 20 years. It works by blocking the same family of sodium channels first uncovered in that Pakistani boy's [music] body, offering real relief from moderate to severe pain without carrying the addiction risk that comes with opioids. The approval came from large clinical trials involving people recovering from real surgeries, comparing this new medication against both a placebo and a traditional opioid.

[00:06:25]The results gave doctors something they'd been hoping for since that 2006 discovery. Solid proof that a pain reliever without addiction risk could actually work in ordinary patients, not just [music] in theory. Sit with that for a second.

[00:06:37]A rare genetic condition first understood through the story of one boy on the other side of the world quietly led to a brand new kind of medicine two decades later. That's not something that happens often in science. Access to this new medicine hasn't been simple either.

[00:06:52]Because it's brand new, it costs far more per pill than older pain medications, and many insurance plans are still deciding how and when they'll cover it. Doctors call it a meaningful step forward, but plenty of patients who could benefit are still waiting for it to become easier to get.

[00:07:07]The personal reflection.

[00:07:09]Now, here's the part worth slowing down for.

[00:07:12]Pain is one of the only experiences almost every person alive has felt. You stubbed a toe. [music] You've touched something too hot. You felt a headache creep in during a long day. It's one of the few things that connects every single person watching this video, no matter where you live, how old you are, or what kind of day you're having. That's part of what makes this topic hit differently than most science stories.

[00:07:35]This isn't distant or abstract. It's something your own body deals with regularly, quietly, usually without you ever stopping to think about it at all.

[00:07:44]Take a second to notice how often your body protects you without asking for credit. The way your hand pulls back from something sharp before you've even decided to move it. The way a sore muscle tells you to rest before real damage happens. It just happens [music] quietly in the background of your life.

[00:08:01]So, here's the real question worth asking.

[00:08:04]Pain isn't just discomfort. It's information. It tells you when to stop, [music] when to protect yourself, when something is wrong before it gets worse.

[00:08:12]What happens when that information stops arriving, even on purpose, even for a good reason? It's worth asking yourself honestly, if you could switch off pain completely, would you want to?

[00:08:23]Most people say yes in the moment they're hurting, but very few would choose to give it up permanently once they understood what it quietly protects them from.

[00:08:32]That's the exact tension crimes of the future was built around. And it's the same tension real [music] doctors are now facing as this kind of medicine slowly becomes more common.

[00:08:42]If this kind of question sticks with you the way it stuck with us, go ahead and hit like and subscribe before the video ends.

[00:08:48]It genuinely helps more than you'd expect. So, let's bring this all together. A movie imagined a world where pain simply disappeared. Real science found that a rare mutation could already do exactly that inside a small number of people. And after nearly 20 years of research, that same idea became an actual medicine approved in January 2025 offering pain relief without the addiction risk that has haunted medicine for decades. That's a rare direct line from fiction to fact. Not stretched, not forced, just followed all the way to the end. And yet the deeper question the film raises is still worth sitting with.

[00:09:24]Pain isn't just something to get rid of.

[00:09:26]It's a system your body built to protect you. Turning it off, even carefully, even with good intentions, means giving something up, too.

[00:09:35]Think about the people born without that system [music] in the first place. Many of them grow up needing to check their own bodies constantly looking for cuts, bruises, or broken bones they would never otherwise notice precisely because the one alarm the rest of us rely on was never there to warn them. Maybe that's the real takeaway here. Every warning system your body carries, even the uncomfortable ones, exists for a reason.

[00:09:58]Understanding that reason rather than simply [music] wishing pain away might be the most useful lesson buried inside this whole story. It's a strange kind of full circle.

[00:10:08]A filmmaker imagined a painless future as something unsettling, almost tragic.

[00:10:12]Meanwhile, real scientists spent 20 years chasing that same painless future as a breakthrough worth celebrating.

[00:10:18]Somewhere between those two views sits the truth. Relief from suffering is worth pursuing, but so is respecting exactly what pain has always done for us. Thanks for staying with this one all the way through. If topics like this were fiction and real science line up in ways nobody expected or your kind of thing, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. We'll see you in the next video.