Curate, connect, and discover
My subspecialty, i guess you could call it, is chronic pain - i did my master's thesis on sleep disorders in patients with chronic pain - so i've got a LOT of thoughts about the concept of 'stealing pain' in teen wolf.
The current definition of pain is
"an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage"
because pain is not purely a physical phenomenon, it's an experience not necessarily tied to any physical damage.
Of course you can delve into the different types of pain and argue that nociceptive and neuropathic pain is due to biochemical triggers (inflammation/tissue damage and nerve damage, respectively) as opposed to nociplastic pain - but even those are heavily modulated by how we perceive them.
In one of my psych classes we were shown a powerful example: In a segment from a local news station a lady had won a competition and as a reward she got a handful of minutes to 'empty out' a kitchen supply store - after all the excitement was done and she was being interviewed post-haul, suddenly a bystander points out that she's standing in a large puddle of blood. She'd dropped a knife into her foot at some point, resulting in a quite large gash. She'd felt nothing until someone pointed it out - endorphins, adrenaline, the works. (She was immediately attended to and recovered completely).
Studies show that pain perception increases dramatically in young, healthy subjects who were sleep-deprived even just for 24 hrs, and in the same vein stress, anxiety and distress also increases pain perception.
So where does that leave the idea of stealing pain in teen wolf? Rather than taking a physical representation of 'pain', maybe it's more stealing the perception of pain, the fear and distress?
Kind of a romantic notion, isn't it?