>"THE brain malady" --  How harmfully ludicrous.  So a vet's persisting agony after losing her legs, etc. in combat suffers only because of her supposed "brain" defect?  

>"Chronic pain CAN occur from an injury that OFTEN is healed on the outside but persists inside the brain."

AH.  Some sensible caveats.

Still, drs, researchers, have no business wrongly insisting they can rule out infections, other persisting tissue injury to nerves, other organs, outside the brain.  'Absence of evidence is not [conclusive] evidence of absence' -- as researchers elsewhere have underscored.  Actually, intense chronic pain IS evidence of persisting damage -- albeit not necessarily establishing persisting damage OUTSIDE the brain.  As quoted here, however "often [injuries APPEAR] healed on the outside," in many cases persisting injury CAN be documented.  Increasingly so as medical science, practice has advanced, advances further.

Similarly, roundtable discussion at the Novartis Foundation Symposium on Anaphylaxis underscored drs., researchers can never entirely rule out "allergy".  At most, they can tell us they have detected no allergy and hence classify sever reaction as "Anaphylactoid," or (presumptively) "Nonallergic Anaphylaxis" -- in WHO parlance.

>"Tinnitus and chronic pain occur when this system is compromised."

Whoops!  Who zapped caveats, nuance necessary to keep this sweeping assertion from being so harmfully, wildly inaccurate?

Should read something more like:

""Tinnitus, chronic pain, or both CAN occur when [WHAT WE ENVISION, WHAT WE DESCRIBE DESCRIBE AS] this system is IMPAIRED.""  

Most people I know suffering persisting agony DO have persisting afflictions/damage outside the brain, yet no tinnitis.  Same as me.  Consistent w/ the top excerpt, even if injuries "often" APPEAR to be "healed on the outside," often they do NOT.  And we can never know for sure that the failure to detect is not a failure of current medical methodology, of current scientific understanding.

Took researchers years, with much debate, much funding, to identify AIDSyndrome as an infectious disease, with HIV the culprit.

Debate still rages w/ many nominally "POST-"infectious afflictions, including many autoimmune disorders, whether the pathogen merely triggered the continuing disease, or whether the pathogen persists as an irritant driving the continuing disease, autoimmunity, etc.

Hence, for example, a researcher's PCR analysis of fluid from my prostate documented a reportedly chronic pathogen that standard clinical methodology does not.  See also, e.g.,

Improvement of postherpetic neuralgia after treatment with intravenous acyclovir followed by oral valacyclovir, Quan D, Hammack BN, Kittelson J, Gilden DH., Arch Neurol. 2006 Jul;63(7):940-2.

>"pain signals can become dysfunctional, leading to a chronic perception of these sensations"

Gibberish.  Sensations perceived?  What, then, are UNperceived sensations?  Pain is an experience.  "Pain perception" makes no more sense than would gibberish about "nausea perception."  Because nausea, too, does not exist beyond our experience.  Stimuli can induce pain, but there is no "pain" for us to "perceive."  Such gibberish gets bandied, IMO, to confuse us and push patently ludicrous, harmful agendas that all chronic pain stems from brain defects.