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Dr Rangan ChatterjeeThe BEST WAYS To Heal Chronic Pain & Trauma WITHOUT Medication | Howard Schubiner
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Howard Schubiner Explains How the Brain Creates and Can Reverse Chronic Pain
- Schubiner argues that the vast majority of chronic pain, from headaches and back pain to IBS and fibromyalgia, is real pain generated by learned neural circuits in the brain rather than structural injury.
- He cites evidence including MRI findings in pain-free people, his Boulder back pain trial in which 75% of treated participants were pain-free after one month, and the failure of surgery and scans to explain most back pain.
- The conversation links chronic pain to stress, adverse childhood events, personality traits like people-pleasing, and cultural and societal pressures, illustrated by Chatterjee's own back pain story.
- Treatment centres on pain reprocessing therapy (changing the narrative, reassuring the brain, graded movement) and emotional awareness and expression therapy, with medication handled flexibly and compassionately.
- Both doctors stress that validation, empathy and careful assessment, rather than dismissal as 'all in your head' or labelling as incurable, are the starting point for healing.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasThe brain decides whether to produce pain
Schubiner says injuries send signals but the brain chooses whether to turn pain on, as in cases of a nail gun injury with no pain or a nail through a boot with no injury but severe pain. Emotions and stress activate the same brain regions as physical injury.
Scan abnormalities often don't explain pain
He cites rates of degenerative and bulging discs in pain-free people, rising to 80% and 60% respectively at age 50, and says telling patients a scan finding is the cause can create fear and worsen pain.
Pain can persist as a learned neural circuit after injury heals
Fear, memory and conditioning keep the danger signal active, so pain can turn on and off with stress, weather or places. Schubiner uses these patterns, along with ruling out structural causes, to identify neural circuit pain.
Changing the narrative can produce rapid relief
In the Boulder trial, 33 of 44 treated people with an average of 10 years of back pain were pain-free in a month using pain reprocessing, without exploring emotions. Schubiner says Chatterjee's self-reassurance when lifting his mother is an example of the same approach.
Fear-driven responses feed the pain cycle
Schubiner describes six Fs (fear, worry, focus, fighting, frustration, figuring out and fixing) that tell the brain there is a danger and worsen symptoms. Interrupting them with safety messages and movement done calmly or with joy retrains the circuits.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe pain is not the problem. It's the solution. What a weird thing to say. It's the solution that our brain has come up with to alert us to a problem.
— Howard Schubiner
When a doctor says or anybody says, "It's all in your head," it's cruel. And it's ignorant because it implies that it's their fault, that they want the pain somehow, that they're crazy or mentally deficient, you know, or making it up, and none of that is true at all.
— Howard Schubiner
The brain decides whether to actually turn on pain or not, whether to give you the experience of pain or not.
— Howard Schubiner
Emotions matter. Emotions are real. We are psychological human beings, and the connections between emotions and our physical body are very real.
— Howard Schubiner
We are spending billions and trillions of dollars for Band-Aids. We're talking about Band-Aid care. Put something over it, as opposed to look and, and find the underlying cause.
— Howard Schubiner
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SPEAKERS
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
hostMedical doctor and host of the podcast "Feel Better, Live More".
Howard Schubiner
guestPhysician and researcher focused on chronic pain treatment approaches such as neural-circuit/pain reprocessing methods.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
