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Woman Who Never Feels Pain

10:00 PM PKT 10 min read

An original illustration of a smiling elderly woman calmly holding a spiky green cactus in her bare hands while two doctors look on in shock.
In this post
  1. The Woman Whose Bell Stayed Silent
  2. Two Operations, and One Doctor Who Refused to Shrug
  3. What a Life Without the Bell Looks Like
  4. Two Small Switches Inside Her Genes
  5. The Danger of a Bell That Never Rings
  6. What Medicine Hopes to Borrow From Her
  7. Sources

Your hand knows this moment by heart. A pan has just come off the flame, your fingertips brush the metal — and the hand is already gone, snatched back before thought can catch up. The other teacher is a dark room and bare feet: a toe finds the leg of a table, and the whole of you learns about it in the same instant.

That sharp flash feels like an enemy. Gently, let us correct it: pain is a friend doing an unpleasant job. Pain is the body’s alarm bell. A smoke alarm is a nuisance when the toast burns; it is a lifesaver on the night something real catches fire. Pain works the same way. It orders you to pull back. To rest the injured part. To look, to treat, to stop. A hundred small rings of that bell, every year, quietly keep you whole.

Now imagine the bell never rings. Not once. Not for a burn, not for a broken bone, not for anything at all.

The Woman Whose Bell Stayed Silent

In Scotland there lives a retired teacher named Jo Cameron. For most of her life she believed she was simply tough — and privately assumed that everyone else was making rather a fuss. She had given birth with little pain. She had broken bones without grasping how serious they were. Cuts and burns had come and gone over the years, sometimes discovered only by the smell of scorched skin, or by the sight of blood.

She was in her sixties before medicine understood what she actually was: one of the rarest patients ever studied, carrying in her genes a discovery that now steers pain research around the world.

A small lesson hides inside her story already, and it costs nothing to pocket: the absence of a complaint is not the same as the absence of a problem. Hold on to that thought. We will meet it again, at her hip.

Two Operations, and One Doctor Who Refused to Shrug

In 2013, aged 65, Cameron had a hip replacement. The joint was severely worn by osteoarthritis, the slow grinding-down of the joints that troubles so many older people. Others had noticed that she walked in a lopsided way; she herself reported no pain whatsoever. The surgery went ahead, and her recorded pain scores afterwards were zero out of ten — climbing once, on a single evening, to just one out of ten. She needed no painkillers.

A year later, at 66, came an operation on her hand. Arthritis had so damaged her thumb joints that her thumbs were deformed, and she could no longer hold a pen properly. Beforehand, she cheerfully told her anaesthetist, Dr Devjit Srivastava, that she would not be needing any pain relief afterwards. He was doubtful, and reasonably so: patients commonly describe recovery from that operation as excruciating. Her pain score was zero. She took no pain medicine at all.

Dr Srivastava did the thing that good doctors do. He got curious. Her medical history showed the same pattern everywhere — this was a woman who had never needed pain relief for anything. Then he applied a test normally used on patients who are slow to wake from sedation: pressing hard on the inner edges of the eye sockets, a spot where pressure produces sharp pain. Cameron felt pressure. Only pressure. Satisfied that he was looking at something genuinely rare, he referred her to the pain genetics team at University College London.

What a Life Without the Bell Looks Like

Once the scientists began asking questions, a lifetime of small, strange stories surfaced. Her wounds healed quickly, and often left little scarring. Even Scotch bonnet chillies — peppers ranked among the hottest on Earth — produced nothing in her beyond a pleasant, warm glow. In careful tests, the researchers tried pins, pinches and heat. They could not make her feel pain.

The quietness reached further than pain. Cameron also feels remarkably little anxiety and fear. The researchers describe a happy, friendly, optimistic woman, one who scores extremely low on measures of worry and dread — though she herself reports being somewhat forgetful. It was as if the same dimmer switch that turned her pain down had softened the mind’s alarm bells alongside it.

If there is a gentle lesson in this part, it belongs to our own kitchens and workshops: the bell earns its keep a hundred times a year, in rescues too small to count. A stubbed toe stings. It is also tuition — and cheap at the price.

Two Small Switches Inside Her Genes

To follow the science, hold one simple picture in mind. The body runs a natural calming system, called the endocannabinoid system, which helps govern pain, mood and memory. One of its messenger chemicals is anandamide, and anandamide quietens pain. But anandamide does not linger: an enzyme called FAAH clears it away quickly, the way a drain empties a sink before the sink can fill.

In Cameron, the drain runs unusually slowly — and it does so for two separate reasons.

The first is a common variant in the FAAH gene itself, which makes the enzyme less active. On its own, that variant is far too widespread to explain her. The second reason is the rare one: a tiny missing piece — a microdeletion — in a neighbouring stretch of DNA called a pseudogene, a gene-like stretch that scientists had long dismissed as useless junk. This one turned out to control the FAAH gene. Because of that, the researchers gave it a name of its own: FAAH-OUT.

With the drain slowed twice over, her body’s natural pain-soothing chemistry stays topped up all day. When scientists measured her blood, her anandamide level stood at about 1.7 times the usual figure, and two related calming chemicals were roughly three times higher than normal. The team’s findings were published in 2019, in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Her family offers a neat check on the idea. Her son carries the FAAH-OUT change on its own, and he does feel pain somewhat less than most people — but nothing close to his mother’s near-total painlessness. Both changes together, it seems, are required for the full effect.

The Danger of a Bell That Never Rings

Here the story turns serious. And here, perhaps, it speaks most directly to the rest of us.

Cameron’s hip had worn itself into a severe state in complete silence. No warning ever arrived. The problem was addressed only when the damage was far advanced and her walk had become visibly lopsided. She has said, in effect, that she would welcome some kind of warning when something is wrong — because in her body, the warning never comes.

Consider what silence costs across a whole lifetime. A burn can deepen while you stand at the stove, announced by smell alone. A broken bone can be walked on for days. So a pain-free life also becomes a life of inspections: hands examined after cooking, feet checked by eye, mirrors and family members doing the work that nerves decline to do.

Which brings the lesson home. If your father waves away his knee, or your mother insists her back is “nothing”, watch how they climb the stairs instead. Believe the limp before you believe the words. And the same kindness applies to ourselves: pain we keep postponing is news we refuse to read, and the news does not soften while the envelope stays shut.

For my part, I no longer curse the smoke alarm when the toast burns. Not after her hip.

What Medicine Hopes to Borrow From Her

The science did not stop at explaining her. In 2023, the UCL team published a follow-up study in the journal Brain, mapping in detail how the FAAH-OUT change works inside cells. They confirmed that it turns down the FAAH gene, and they found that it also influences pathways involved in wound healing and mood — which may explain both Cameron’s quick healing and her unusual calm. Professor James Cox of UCL, one of the senior researchers behind the work, presented the findings as a step towards drug discovery that could one day bring far-reaching benefits for patients.

The honest position is hopeful, and careful, in equal measure. Drugs designed to block the FAAH enzyme have indeed been developed and tested, encouraged by cases like hers. So far, though, their trial results have been disappointing, and no medicine of this kind has reached the market. For now, her genes are best read as a set of directions that science is still learning to follow.

And perhaps that is already a great deal. A stretch of DNA the world had labelled junk now carries a name and a job. A calming system inside the body is understood better than before. And a retired teacher from Scotland, who spent decades assuming she was merely tough, turned out to be carrying one of the most instructive genetic stories in modern medicine — uncovered only because one doctor, on one hospital ward, stopped long enough to ask why his patient did not hurt.

One last note, offered gently: everything in this post is general information about a reported medical case. It is not medical advice. If pain troubles you often — or if you have ever suspected that you feel far less pain than the people around you — please take that to a doctor.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jo Cameron? A retired teacher from Scotland who feels almost no pain, and remarkably little anxiety or fear. Scientists reported her case in 2019, and researchers at University College London have studied her since.

How did doctors discover her condition? After a hip replacement at 65 she needed no painkillers, and a year later she again felt nothing after hand surgery that patients usually find excruciating. Her anaesthetist, Dr Devjit Srivastava, reviewed her history, ran a pressure test beside her eyes, and referred her to pain geneticists.

Why does she feel no pain? Two genetic changes work together: a common variant in the FAAH gene, which weakens an enzyme that breaks down the calming chemical anandamide, and a rare microdeletion in a pseudogene the scientists named FAAH-OUT, which turns the FAAH gene down further. Her anandamide levels run higher than usual as a result.

Can she feel anything at all? Yes — touch and pressure register normally. In the eye-socket test she felt pressure but no pain. Her pain scores after major surgery were recorded as zero out of ten, and fiercely hot chilli peppers give her only a pleasant glow.

Is a life without pain actually dangerous? It is. Pain is a warning system. Cameron has missed burns and broken bones, and her hip joint was severely worn before anyone addressed it, precisely because no warning ever arrived. People with very low pain must inspect their bodies by sight instead.

Could her genes lead to new pain medicines? That remains the hope. Her case has encouraged work on FAAH-blocking drugs, and the 2023 follow-up mapped how FAAH-OUT affects pain, healing and mood pathways. So far, however, drugs of this type have disappointed in trials, and none is on the market.

Sources

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