The doctors were stumped. "My worst fear was that it was a tumor on his spinal cord," his mother says. The Uihleins (pronounced E-lines), who live in Milwaukee, Wis., took Alex to several respected medical centers in the Midwest, but none had an answer. One doctor even accused Alex of faking. "He said, 'You deserve an Academy Award,' " Alex says bitterly. For a day or two, even Julia began to doubt her son. Then, she remembers, "I said, 'Let's get out of here.' "

By November, Alex needed a wheelchair. Julia kept calling doctors. Finally, a neurologist suggested that Alex might have an unusual nerve disorder known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy. He urged Julia and her husband David to take their son to Children's Hospital in Boston to see a doctor named Charles Berde.

A pediatrician and anesthesiologist, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Berde, 46, is co-founder and director of the pain-treatment service at Children's Hospital. That service, established in 1986, was among the first in the U.S. to specialize in children's pain. Fewer than a dozen American hospitals provide such departments for children.

The staff includes doctors, nurses, psychologists, physical therapists and an acupuncturist. They treat children in the hospital and in an outpatient clinic for both acute and chronic pain--due to surgery, injuries, cancer, cystic fibrosis, AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, migraine headaches, hemophilia and nerve disorders. The team is nationally recognized for its expertise in treating the reflex sympathetic dystrophy that Alex Uihlein's doctor suspected. Berde is also a leading researcher in pediatric anesthesiology, and he has written more than 70 scientific papers and 50 book chapters dealing with ways to improve the prevention and treatment of pain in children. No child in his care is ever accused of faking. "They're not crazy, they're not faking, they're not making it up, they're not lying," he says. "Pain is real."