Being able to feel pain can help avoid dangerous situations and accelerate the healing process. But sometimes prolonged pain can turn into a chronic and debilitating disease. Two reports on pages [275][1] and [279][2] of this issue suggest approaches for counteracting this "bad" pain. In their Perspective, Iadarola and Caudle discuss the work of Mantyh et al ., who use a toxin to target key neurons that mediate this type of pain in the spinal cord, and Malmberg et al ., who examine nociceptive processes in mice lacking a neuronal form of the signal transduction enzyme PKC that do not feel this sort of pain. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/278/5336/275 [2]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/278/5336/279