Dr. Howard Schubiner
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Why would pain be increasing, especially back pain? But it's also other pains, headache pain, joint pain, stomach pains. It's not because our bodies have changed. We haven't evolved or changed our backs significantly in the last 20 years over how our backs have been in the last thousand years.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And when people see these statistics, they're always quick to find something in our environment that is causing this huge increase in pain, like kids. when I studied both pediatrics and internal medicine. And when we had a kid, teenager or a child who had back pain 30 years ago, 40 years ago almost when I was studying pediatrics now, it was an emergency.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
There was back pain in a kid, kids never got back pain. And then in recent years, I saw a study that showed that one third of teenagers had reported back pain. And so everyone's quick to say, well, it must be their backpacks. They're carrying too many books. Or it must be that they're exercising too much. Or they're exercising too little. Or they're sitting too much. Or it's their computers.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Or it's their cell phones. And none of that is true. It has nothing to do with that. It turns out that pain follows cultural patterns.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
standards if you look at the history of medicine you see that there are certain illnesses that tend to become more prevalent in populations over time and then they tend to wane and then they tend to come back and i'm not talking about cancer or heart disease or diabetes because those are the things that we know have changed over time in relation to a variety of things such as diet and environmental pesticides and whatever i'm talking about
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So obviously I'm talking about pain, but what else is dramatically soaring young people in the last 20 years? Anxiety and depression. What else has risen is fatigue. And so if we can look broadly at our society and if we can look broadly at how our brain works and our body works, I think we'll find the answers to these questions.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But I can promise you it won't lie in some change in how we move our body or how our backs are. That I can tell you for sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
You know, one of the things I'd love to think about is how we know what we know. And everyone knows the Earth is not flat. Everyone knows the Earth is round. And we say, well, how do we know? Well, you go up in spaceships, we can see the Earth is round. It's pretty simple. But people knew the Earth was round before we had spaceships.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Because if there was a boat, I know I'm making a little digression here, but we have a little time. Is that okay?
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So I love this story. So when a boat was approaching the land from the ocean, you would see the top of the mast before you saw the rest of the boat. Why is that? Because the earth is curved. If the earth were flat, you would see the boat, you would see the whole boat at the same time. You wouldn't see the top first, and then you'd gradually see the rest of the boat.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So if people are astute and thoughtful in thinking, they would understand, hey, the earth is round. With pain, we know that not all injuries cause pain. And this is an amazing thing. And we've known this for hundreds of years. There's millions of stories about it. People have had injuries, sometimes severe injuries, nail in their head.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
There's some guy, famous story, had shot a nail right into his head. Didn't notice, kind of. He thought the nail went off somewhere else. Didn't have pain. There's all these things. But the point is, if you can have an injury and not have pain, what that means is that when your finger is hurt, when you cut your finger, it's not your finger that causes pain. It's actually the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Because what happens is the brain has to make a decision to turn on pain or not turn on pain. And so not all injuries cause pain, number one. Number two, not all pain is due to injuries. And we know this for 100% because we've seen thousands of people, and this is the work that I do, is seeing people have pain, which is real pain, who have no injury at all. And this is extremely common.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So when you just take those two things together, what you come to is that, number one, all pain is generated in the brain and all pain is real. Not imaginary, not fake. There's no such thing as, well, this pain is real because I have an injury and this pain isn't real because I don't have an injury.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Because research shows that stress and emotions activate the exact same parts of the brain as does a physical injury. And this is mind blowing. And again, straight neuroscience. And if, and if stress and emotion can activate the same parts of the brain as a physical injury, then the pain that results from stress and emotion and the pain that results from the physical injury are the same pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
It's all real pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Yeah. There's three ways of thinking about pain. Three models. One model is, and lots of people believe each of these models. The first model is what I would call the biomedical model, which means that all pain is created by a physical injury. And a lot of people believe that, and a lot of doctors believe that. And this can't possibly be 100% true because, as we'll see and we'll talk.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But that's one model. And that model works for certain types of illnesses. If you have an abscess on your spine that's causing severe back pain and you have surgery and you take it out, pain will be healed. If you have appendicitis with severe abdominal pain, take it out, it'll be healed. So this biomedical model is very...
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
helpful and useful for certain kinds of illnesses but it can't possibly apply to all illnesses so what then people who became were more enlightened in the in the field of pain back we're talking about
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
60s 70s 80s or so they began to realize well the brain plays a role and the spinal cord plays a role and you can have pain due to an injury but the brain can damp it down or the brain can make it worse and so that led to the second model of pain which is called the biopsychosocial model and the biopsychosocial model is the dominant model throughout all of pain management
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
in the world and all the top centers that do pain management use the biopsychosocial model. I trained in the biopsychosocial model. I have a picture of George Engle on my wall up on top there who developed biopsychosocial models. There's nothing wrong with that model. It's a great model.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But it turns out that that model is really best applied to illnesses that have a physical component and a mind-body component where you have both. And then that model allows people not just to give medical treatment, so people in this pain management model give medical treatment, they give physical therapy treatment, they give
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
um cognitive behavioral therapy type treatments to help cope with the pain better from a psychological point of view they use acupuncture they use medication so it's kind of a you know all hands on deck let's let's approach it from a variety of ways which which would make perfect sense that seems to make perfect sense we'll do a little bit of everything but that model is not working
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
That model works as pain management. That's what its goal is, pain management. But if you ask, have you ever been in chronic pain? If you've talked to people who have been in chronic pain, they don't want pain management, really. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Right. And I'm sure anyone who's listening now, everyone who's listening now knows somebody, as you do, family member, friends, colleagues, business partners, who are either suffering or have suffered with chronic pain of some form or another. And I can guarantee they don't really, their goal isn't like, let me just manage it. Yeah, that's great.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And I'm not knocking this field, the field is doing the best it can, but their view of chronic pain is that it has to be managed. Their view of chronic pain is number one, we don't understand why it's there, it's chronic, it's persistent. We haven't really found exactly why it is, and so we'll try to do everything about it to manage it.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Our goal is to manage it, and that's the goal of the psychological therapies of cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness-based therapies, the three major, major psychological therapies for chronic pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And the research on those methods for treating chronic pain, chronic back pain, chronic fibromyalgia pain, chronic headache pain, et cetera, shows that their treatment is only marginally effective. It's effective to a small degree, on average, one point lowering on a 10-point pain scale, which is admittedly not that great. So it turns out there's another model, the third model. Are you with me?
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
I'm sorry, I'm going on a little long.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
This is really important. There's a third model, and I'm calling that and I didn't coin this phrase, but I'm using this phrase from some great researchers called the symptom perception model. And this model is the idea that the brain is generating the pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
When that's true and I've got data and we can talk more about this, but I'll just say for the moment that the vast majority of people with chronic pain do not have an ongoing physical injury in their body to be causing that pain. And what I just said, again, is a mind blowing and revolutionary statement that many doctors, maybe most doctors would not agree with.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Most people in the other two camps would tend not to agree with, but we can talk more about the specific instances of why I think that's true. And we have some research data that just came out about why I think that's true. But for the moment, if you take the view that at least some of the people, I say it's a vast majority, but at least some people have real and severe pain,
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
in the absence of injury in their body. And for these people, the symptom perception model is gonna be more applicable and more accurate and more effective because what we've shown by the emerging treatments that we are using, which we can talk about as well, when you use these treatments for the right person in the right disorder in this model,
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
The results are not just a small decrease in pain, but literally elimination of pain, reversal of pain, or at least dramatic improvement in pain. And no one can claim that 100% of their patients are cured. Nobody. That's not true for anybody. I wouldn't claim that. But the data that we have is really much more robust and powerful than the other data on pain management. So that's how I see it.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And that's why I think the system is a little bit broken because The system is really focused on either the biomedical model or the biopsychosocial model, but there's very few people in the medical system who are using the symptom perception model so far.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Yes, for example, we did a study in Boulder, Colorado with people with chronic back pain. The average duration of pain was 10 years. So people have had back pain for 10 years. And in the other models, they'll say, well, that's not curable. In our study, 75% of the people who engaged in our model, who took our program and did this form of treatment,
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
The one that's called, one of the major two, one is called pain reprocessing therapy. 75% of them were virtually pain-free in one month. I mean, that's astounding. That's astounding. That's astounding. So it's possible. That's what we're seeing. There's hope.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Well, you know, I'm a physician, and I love being a physician. I love our profession. And it's so sad that at least half the patients that I see, I'm apologizing for our medical system to them. I'm apologizing to them for how they've been treated by other physicians.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
by other physicians who don't understand that their pain is real, even when you can't find a physical cause for it, who tend to dismiss patients and not treat them with the love and compassion and caring that they need and they deserve. And they're being treated like they're drug seeking or they're complaining or, you know, and especially women and minorities are often treated that way.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And it just breaks my heart to see that because the people who have chronic pain, as we'll talk about, there's a reason for it. And the reasons have to do with their lives. And what has happened to them in their lives has often been traumatic, difficult, damaging, stressful, things that are outside of their control. And their brain has responded to that by creating pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And we'll talk about that more as well. But the point is, is that The amount of compassion they need should be double or triple what they're getting. So that's one thing that I really see as a horrible problem in our medical profession. The second thing is that people don't know. Doctors have not been taught this third model, the symptom perception model.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
They haven't been taught the neuroscience of predictive processing and how the brain works. They haven't been taught that the brain generates pain, so they don't really understand it. And they're working within their model. And their model tends to be you get locked into your model the more you do it over time. And so people are doing, for example, there's an injection therapy for back pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
There's a variety of different types of injections for chronic low back pain. Those studies, the research studies where they compare those injections versus placebo injections show no difference. I mean, this is astounding. I mean, it's true. It's right there to read. Anybody can read these data. Why are people still giving them? Because sometimes the treatment is working.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
If the treatment is working no better than placebo, but it's still working, that means the mechanism by which it's working is a placebo mechanism. And if someone's back pain is coming from their brain and not their back, a good placebo can be curative. I mean, it can make a huge difference. So people are still doing those and they're still making, obviously, money doing those.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Their practice is based on that. And the biotechnical industry is a huge industry because back pain is so big and so much money is in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
and therefore there's a big biotechnical device companies that have been making devices for 50 years or so newer newer newer ones to get people to use and some of these are expensive but they're expensive so the the the device company is making money the doctor is doing it is making money The hospital is making money. This is all fee for service.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Our system is based on the more you do, the more you get paid. As opposed to the healthier you keep people, the more you get paid. Different system. So there's a lot of incentives in that direction that range from not understanding and just doing the thing that you know to actual financial incentives.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Yeah, yeah, it's misleading. And when people learn about this, they're shocked. And they say to me, how come my doctor didn't tell me all this? And it turns out that if you're in your 30s and you're healthy and you have no back pain at all, you're in your 30s, about 35% to 40% of people in their 30s are going to have disc degeneration on an MRI with no pain at all.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
30% are going to have disc bulging with no pain at all. These are 30-year-olds, and their MRIs are going to be abnormal with no pain. Why are their MRIs abnormal with no pain? Because an abnormal MRI for these types of mild findings is normal. You know, you look very young to me. and I look at your hair and it's like all black.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But I'm looking at your beard, there might be a little bit of gray in there.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
I'm just picking that up. Sorry, I'm not to harp on it or anything. But the point is that gray hair is normal for your age, even though you're young. And that gray hair is not a disease. It's not causing you pain unless it bothers you emotionally, I guess. But when we look at MRIs of the spine, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a little bit of wrinkles.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
People get wrinkles when they're even in their 30s and 40s, a little bit. They get wrinkles. They get a little bit of gray hair when they're in their 30s or 40s. Now, if you take 50-year-olds and you do MRIs on them who are healthy and have no back pain at all, 60% of them are gonna have degenerative discs and 50% are gonna have bulging discs.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And you take 60 year olds, 80% of them have degenerative discs and 70% have bulging discs with no pain at all. So if you have back pain, and you go to a doctor and you're either 30 or 50 or 70, there's a high likelihood that an MRI is gonna show some of these abnormalities, bulging disc, even herniated disc, spinal stenosis, facet arthropathy, arthritis.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
All these things are seen in healthy, normal people. So why would we make the assumption that that's the cause of the pain when that is something that also occurs in healthy people with no problem? If you had face pain and the doctor said it's because you're gray, you would laugh. It was ridiculous. But that's exactly what we're doing to people. And so we are very well aware of this.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And radiologists need to change. They need to stop reporting these things as being abnormal as opposed to reporting these things as being part of the normal range of what we expect to see. But in any case, we have developed a second level criteria in back pain and other pains to determine if the pain is actually caused by the brain or the pain is caused by the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And that's what we used in a recent research study we just published that showed that 88% Of the 222 people that we evaluated who had chronic neck and back pain, had non-structural pain, 88%. That's a huge number. And obviously, if you have chronic back pain or any back pain and go to a doctor and you get an MRI, 90 plus percent, they're going to tell you it's structural.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But it turns out it's actually the opposite. Almost 90% is non-structural because we have developed criteria to look very carefully at the pain to try to figure out what it really is. And we just published that paper in the last month or so. And so we're excited to have it out there so people can argue about it and fight about it or believe it or tear it up or do whatever they want to.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
But it's there and the criteria are there too.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Right, right. So the brain has a danger signal. When you're driving on the highway, your danger signal is on, full blast, ready at any moment. If a car swerves towards you, quick, jump, turn the wheel. If you're walking down the street, somebody walks behind you, all of a sudden, boom, your danger signal jumps up and you have a reaction to that.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And our brain's danger signal is there to protect us, and pain is there to protect us. If you break an ankle, your danger signal will turn on to cause pain until you stop walking on that broken ankle. If so, it's a message, it's an alarm, it's a protective device. It's like a smoke alarm in that sense, right? And the smoke alarm is just alerting us to an underlying problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
What's the underlying cause? Is it an ankle fracture or not? Now, Everyone knows that they've had, you could get a headache when you have a stressful day at work. You could get a stomach pain when you're trying to speak in front of a large audience.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
You could, you know, you could, I remember the other day I was at a, I was ready to give a lecture and I love lecturing, I love talking, but I looked at my hand just before the lecture and my hand was shaking like this.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
just like totally involuntarily my brain was just literally sending me a message hey buddy you know you're a little anxious now you need to kind of calm and compose yourself even though i didn't feel that consciousness or this danger signal is in our subconscious brain it turns on when there's something to alert us when there's something wrong and as i said stress and emotions cause the exact same parts of the brain to light up as does a physical injury
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So we have memories. When you, one of the very first people I saw when I was just starting this work 21 years ago, was a woman who got head pain after getting a new pair of glasses. She put the glasses on, boom, her head started hurting and she had pain for 17 years every day, had pain every day for 17 years. She went to dozens of doctors, injections, medications, nobody could help her.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And so she comes to me and what I wanna do is hear your life, hear your story. And so, because putting on a new pair of glasses is not gonna cause head pain for 17 years. There must be something that got triggered in that moment. And what got triggered in that moment was something in her brain and something that was subconscious.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
So her story was when she was young, her mom was fine, her dad was unpredictable. Some days he'd come home, he'd be happy and joking, and other days coming home, he'd be in a horrible mood and be angry and mean. And he would grab her by her shirt and yell and scream right in her face. And that would be all to me. She'd never know what kind of dad she was gonna get.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
She grew up, she got married, she had kids, she was working, things were going fine. And so that day she got the new pair of glasses And I asked her what was going on in your life at the time you got the new pair of glasses. She said, well, my kids were okay. My husband was okay. My work was okay. Well, I had a new boss. I said, well, what was your boss? She said, well, he was unpredictable.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Sometimes he would be happy and great. And other times he would be the cruelest meanest guy. And I never knew what I was going to get. And her head pain was a warning signal from her brain. It's so easy to understand when you understand how the brain works.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And the brain has a memory and remembers the traumas in your life and remembers how to avoid that or how to get away from that or what you need to do or whatever. But the brain can't speak English. And it just caused pain. And she became fine. In three or four months, her headaches were gone after 17 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And that was just such a mind-blowing experience for me, 21 years ago, understanding this and seeing the results that she could have. And it just gave me so much joy and confidence going forward and realizing we're onto something here. This is somebody nobody else could help. And I could help, but it wasn't anything special that I did.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
It was just having a different understanding, having a different model, having slightly different tools.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Well, there's millions and millions of people with chronic pain, not to mention chronic fatigue and anxiety and depression and insomnia and all sorts of other disorders that are brain generated for the most part. So there's not enough practitioners in the world, certainly now, to help everybody.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Fortunately, and that's why we've written all the materials that we have to give people the tools to do most of this. Most people can do this on their own, I believe. And so what are we doing? So there's the treatment steps that we use. The first step is understanding how the brain works. The fact that the brain actually generates what we experience. The brain generates what we see.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
You don't see with your eyes. If you needed your eyes to see, you couldn't see in your dreams. We don't hear with our ears. And there's a lot of stuff on that. I've got a course on the Coursera platform that explains all this. It's free if people want to look at that. But anyway, and our brain generates what we feel. So it's understanding that.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And once people understand that, then they can be open. They can begin to open their mind to the possibility that their pain or their other symptoms might be caused by the brain, just might be. But that's the first step. being open and understanding that if you have pain generated by your brain, it's not because you're weak. It's not because you're crazy. It's not because you're deficient.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
It's not because you want it. It's not because it's your fault. It's because that's what your brain is generating in response to whatever was going on in your life, which triggered it in the first place. You're just human.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Exactly, exactly. So that's the first step. The second step is this assessment step that we've been kind of talking about. And the assessment step involves a number of things. Again, it's all written in our materials. But it involves things like looking for things like childhood trauma or not necessarily big trauma. Sometimes it's little trauma. Sometimes it's bullying.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Sometimes it's illness in the family. Sometimes it's some amount of overly perfectionism or criticism. So it's looking for that. It's looking for other illnesses that have occurred in your life. So when someone comes to me in their 40s or 50s and they say, well, I've got this neck pain, let's say, And I'll say, well, let's look at what other things. Did you have anything else?
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Well, I had school phobia when I was a kid. I had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I had migraine when I was in my 20s. I had heartburn or irritable bowel when I was in my 30s. Maybe I had some pelvic pain. So you're seeing a story that's being built, right? You're seeing evidence that's coming in. And then we're looking at the symptoms themselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
If you're having neck pain, well, is it always there? Well, it's not always there. When does it come or when does it go? Well, it's much worse when I'm at work. Okay. It's better when I go on vacation. Okay. It's worse when I, if I even think about it, it jumps up. It's worse when the weather occurs. It sometimes is in the right side of my neck, but sometimes it's on the left side of my neck.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And when you begin to put all these clues together, now you're beginning to see, and the MRI doesn't show anything serious other than the normal findings that we were talking about. Now you can be certain and say, oh, this is coming from my brain. Why would it be turning on and off? If you have a broken arm, the pain is not going to turn on and off.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
It's not going to move to a different part of the arm. So we're just using common sense. And that's what we used in that research study that I mentioned with the back pain. So now you have the assessment. You can have an understanding of that the pain is due to neural circuits in the brain, number one. And number two, what was going on in your life when it started?
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Did you feel trapped in some way? Was there something at work? Was there something with your child? Was there something with your spouse? Was there something with your parents? A parent gets sick and now needs a lot more help and a lot more attention. But that same parent maybe was kind of not available when you were a kid.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
so now you're being loving and caring obligated being obligated to go help your parent which you want to do and should do but on the other hand there's this kind of underlying resentment that's going on so there's this conflict of emotions going on in your brain and guess what happened the brain's danger signal goes starts beeping
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
And as you're driving to your mom's assisted living home or you're driving to your dad's apartment, all of a sudden your neck starts turning. Wow. Now, what a difference that is to understand that as opposed to, yeah, I've got a bulging disc in my neck and I have to get injections or take medication. That's a huge change.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
I mean, we're human beings, and human beings are social beings, and they're emotional beings, and they're psychological beings. And to ignore that is to not understand what it means to be a human being. We depend on each other. We depend on our relationships for our health and our well-being and our vitality. I mean, people who are lonely, who have few friends, die at an earlier age. We know that.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
people who um who have a lot of great connections live longer live healthier people who think that they're doing well have a positive attitude in their life they do better your audience knows all this this is not you know this has been written about you know in the last decade or so
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
to a significant degree but what we're doing we're taking it to the next step to really understand how those forces can actually be the most important forces in relation to having pain or fatigue or anxiety or depression or insomnia and so so that's the second step the assessment and understanding what's going on Then we have some tools.
Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
We've developed some treatments that are specific to this symptom perception model that are different than the tools that are used in the pain management model.