Once again, I started a comment and lost it. Maybe it's floating around somewhere in the virtual universe and will pop up again in its unfinished state. (I hope not)

A very accessible article... no jargon, not hard to understand at all. Schwann cells--I'd heard of them before but didn't know anything about them. Now I do !! The continuing education on SteemSTEM :)

I won't try to answer your question...that'll give me a headache, but I think it's great that we know more about pain receptors and pain transmission. So much about pain is not understood. We used to deal with it in the past (when a cause couldn't be found) by attributing it to hysteria. Now we deal with it by masking it--opiods. Look where that got us. Wouldn't it be wonderful to actually understand the mechanism and address that? Schwann cells seem to offer a good clue.

However, I do have to mention how distressing I found the description of the pain inflicted on the mice. There is no way to humanely inflict pain. These are cruel experiments, and, as you say:

would have been nice to see how relevant this is to humans

We don't even know if this is useful! I'm going to refer you to an article in The Scientist that suggests a humane alternative to suffering:
https://www.the-scientist.com/critic-at-large/opinion--ai-beats-animal-testing-at-finding-toxic-chemicals-65795

Maybe it's time we reexamined the experiment model. Just an idea, a bit of a tangent from the subject of your post. And this is a great post.

Thank you, as always, for advancing my understanding of science!