Dhru Purohit Show
What is Your Body Trying to Tell You? The Top Causes of Chronic Pain and How to Tackle Pain Head On
Mon, 28 Apr 2025
This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Manukora Honey. Chronic pain affects millions of people, yet traditional approaches often focus only on managing symptoms, without addressing the root cause. Today’s guests share a groundbreaking perspective: that pain is created by the brain as a signal of an underlying emotional issue that needs attention. By identifying and addressing these emotional triggers, lasting relief can be achieved by rewiring the brain. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re bringing you a special compilation episode featuring Dhru’s conversations with leading experts on getting to the root cause of chronic pain. Dr. Andrea Furlan breaks down the drivers of chronic pain and debunks common myths around treatment. She also highlights the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle in worsening pain and shares her unique, integrative approach to healing. Next, Dr. Howard Schubiner explains why chronic pain is becoming more prevalent and how it’s closely connected to the brain. He outlines why the current model of pain management falls short and introduces Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy—an evidence-based approach that has been shown to be more effective than traditional treatments. Dr. Schubiner also discusses how adverse childhood experiences can manifest as chronic pain later in life, and how we can retrain our brains to change our perception and experience of pain. In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: Top myths in treating chronic pain (01:05) Tier ranking of the top drivers of chronic pain (06:40) Corrective exercises for addressing lower back pain (12:36) Solutions, answers, and advice for lower back pain (15:33) Evidence-based alternative approaches for chronic lower back and shoulder pain (19:26) Do's and don'ts to prevent abuse of the body (22:51) Why back pain has doubled in the last twenty years (29:20) What pain in the body actually is (32:28) Why the current approach to pain and pain management is broken (35:43) The Symptom Perception Model and its effectiveness (43:00) Incentives that contribute to systemic failure (44:32) Why MRIs don’t provide a complete picture of pain (49:11) Adverse childhood experiences and their relationship to pain (54:45) Understanding how the brain generates pain (59:58) Final thoughts (01:07:43) Also mentioned: Full episode with Dr. Andrea Furlan Full episode with Dr. Howard Schubiner This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Manukora Honey. Right now, get 40% off sitewide at Cozy Earth. From May 2 through May 4th, buy One, Get One Free viscose bamboo pajamas!! Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUPBOGO. Upgrade to the creamiest honey, packed with antioxidants and prebiotics. Just go to manukora.com/dhru to get $25 off the Starter Kit and boost your energy, immunity, and digestive health today! Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the top myths about chronic pain?
A big one is that it's normal to feel pain with aging. So a lot of people think that Aging, getting older is like a synonym of getting more pain. And people make jokes about this. They say, you know, arthritis comes with age. Everybody has arthritis and arthritis just gets worse. That is not true. That is not true. OK, so learn something.
It's not because you're old that you must have pain or you are going to suffer more pain. A lot of people, a lot of people, they have arthritis. You can see their bones. They may look horrible. They don't have any pain. So we all know this. Even in MRI, you see people, this has been research done over and over and over.
They MRI people with, you know, who don't have any pain, like walking around and doing everything they want. And they have even disc herniation, disc extrusion, disc prolapses. They have bad arthritis. An example is my grandmother. She was 92 and she had an x-ray of her neck. because she had another thing in her head. And I looked at her x-ray.
I've never seen the most horrible x-ray in my whole life. She did not have any disc between the vertebra. And then I asked her, grandma, did you ever have neck pain? She said, no, never had. So it's not a synonym, okay? Aging is not a synonym that you have. So that's the first big myth. The second one, Drew, is that because pain is invisible, right?
When people, a lot of people say, I am suffering pain. I am in pain. My pain is terrible. And then the doctors look at them, the friends, the family, the co-workers, the managers. Oh, you're fine. You can move everything. I don't see anything. The doctor said that nothing has broken your bones. You're telling me that you're in pain, that you can't work, you can't get out of bed.
That is another myth because pain is invisible. If the person tells you they are in pain, they are really in pain. So we do need, because again, that pain that centralizes, that I just explained to you and it transforms to chronic pain, it's called nociplastic pain because it involves plasticity of the pain system. We cannot see in x-rays or normal MRIs
We can see in laboratory with some specific tests and some specific physical exam. But another myth is that these people are faking, these people are lazy or they're just depressed and they need to exercise. And why don't you exercise more? Why don't you? It's so simple. It's not that simple. If you have an acute pain, let's say a fracture or an inflammation, a toothache, the body heals.
We know that the body heals. Everything. And scars don't hurt. If the pain continues after the period that you expect the tissues to heal, the fracture is done, the orthopedic surgeon looks at the x-ray site, everything is healed here. Why you still have pain?
It might be because now your pain has transitioned to chronic pain, which now is becoming a neurological disorder because it's more like a sensitization of the pain system. Drew, if you allow me a few seconds, a few minutes here, maybe I like to use the analogy of the alarm system of a house. So the pain is the alarm system of our body. So it's exactly the same thing as an alarm system of a house.
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Chapter 2: How does aging relate to chronic pain?
I bought one very expensive when I renovated this office. And then I had to return because I really couldn't use that one. So buy one that you can return and get a refund if possible. And try the same thing for pillows and mattresses. There is no recipe, Drew, for, you know, you have to buy this pillow or you have to use this mattress. Each person is different.
But they need to find what it takes. And so go to a mattress store and stay there for about two hours and try one, try another one, try another one to see which one you feel better. Some people like, you know, the harder mattress. Some people like the softer one. There is really no recipe. And we know, too, that...
Really, the mattress, the chair, the pillows, they're not the main drivers of chronic pain. We know now because there has been some trials, they gave the best pillow to people and they compared to a less exciting one. And there was no big difference to treat people differently. So I would say don't spend too much money too on the most expensive thing.
You may be surprised that the cheaper mattress, pillow or chair might do the thing for you.
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I further explore the brain-pain connection in my conversation with Dr. Howard Schubiner. Dr. Schubiner's work challenges traditional beliefs that pain is solely the result of physical injuries. And in our conversation, we discuss how the brain often generates pain in response to an unresolved stress or trauma.
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