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Dr Rangan ChatterjeeDr Rangan Chatterjee

The Real Reason Pain, Fatigue & Anxiety Won't Go Away | Howard Schubiner

The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live This episode is brought to you by: AG1: Get FREE AG1 Flavour Sampler, AGZ Sampler, Vitamin D3+K2 and Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription (worth $87, US only) https://bit.ly/43FwxQl Imagine being told for 25 years that your pain is incurable – then making a full recovery within six weeks. That’s exactly what happened to one of the case studies in this episode and his story is far from exceptional. Could it be that much of the chronic pain we accept in life isn’t evidence our body is broken, but a sign our brain is trying to protect us? My guest this week is Dr Howard Schubiner, one of the world’s leading experts in chronic pain and the mind-body interaction. He’s spent more than 20 years working wonders with people who’d been told their pain was untreatable. He’s published over 100 scientific papers, runs one of the most respected programmes of its kind in the US, and his new book, Unlearn Your Pain, is set to transform how we think about suffering. To kick off this game-changing conversation, Howard debunks some common beliefs around pain, including the assumption that an MRI scan will accurately diagnose back issues. We talk about why bulging discs, degeneration and other scary-sounding findings show up just as often in people who aren’t in pain. And why the language used in scan reports can sometimes do real harm. To explain this, Howard talks us through the difference between structural and neuroplastic pain. The key learning here? All pain is created by the brain, through something called predictive processing. In structural pain, there’s clear tissue damage so your brain creates pain to help you protect the area and seek help. In neuroplastic pain, there’s some sort of perceived danger but no real injury. Here’s what’s important: both types are real. You are feeling pain. The difference is in the treatment. For that, Howard shares his five-part framework for reversing neuroplastic pain – and it has nothing to do with painkillers. He also reveals how the same principles can be applied to tinnitus, dizziness, brain fog, long covid, IBS, anxiety, depression, fatigue and more. We talk childhood, the personality traits that subtly make us more vulnerable to neuroplastic symptoms, and why women are so often the ones carrying the weight. Whether you're living with a long-term condition yourself, supporting someone who is, or you’re simply curious about the communication pathways between our bodies and our brains, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. #feelbetterlivemore Find out more about Dr Schubiner: Website https://unlearnyourpain.com/ Twitter https://twitter.com/hschubiner Dr Schubiner’s book: UNLEARN YOUR PAIN The Science of Recovering from Chronic Pain, Fatigue, Anxiety, and Depression US https://amzn.to/3RySyzy UK https://amzn.to/4u5Qv3s #feelbetterlivemore #feelbetterlivemorepodcast ------- Order MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS. US & Canada version https://amzn.to/3RyO3SL, UK version https://amzn.to/3Kt5rUK ----- Follow Dr Chatterjee at: Website: https://drchatterjee.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drchatterjee Twitter: https://twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Newsletter: https://drchatterjee.com/subscription DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Dr. Rangan ChatterjeehostDr Howard Schubinerguest
Jun 3, 20261h 27mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. RC

    What do you think are some of the most common myths that exist out there when it comes to the topic of pain?

  2. HS

    What I always tell people is you can't understand pain unless you understand the brain. And this is like, "What? Wait a minute." [laughs] 'Cause everyone understands pain. Everyone knows that your body's damaged when you have pain. So the first myth is that pain always is caused by some structural damage or injury-

  3. RC

    Mm

  4. HS

    ... to the body. And we know through the simple fact that you can have an injury and have no pain. Have you ever experienced that, where you had an injury and it didn't actually hurt? And this has been documented thousands of times, so we know that occurs. But if you can have an injury and have no pain... I mean, I-- A friend of mine shot a nail in his hand and had no pain. I mean, come on. [laughs] So the point is, the brain determines whether there's pain or not. That is revolutionary and remarkable, just that. And so-- And you can have pain in the absence of injury. So when you put those two facts together, they're facts. You can have an injury and have no pain. You can have pain without an injury. Now, you have to ask yourself the question, when you have pain, what is it? What's going on? And that opens the door to a whole new understanding of what pain is.

  5. RC

    Yeah. One of the key messages I get from your work and from your latest book, Unlearn Your Pain, is that pain is really a signal.

  6. HS

    Exactly.

  7. RC

    Okay? It's a signal that we need to understand. And instead of just looking at the pain as, "Oh, I have pain. How do I treat it?" It's also important to understand-

  8. HS

    Yeah

  9. RC

    ... why am I currently in pain? As you say-

  10. HS

    Yeah

  11. RC

    ... a friend of yours shot a nail into their hand. I think if you ask a hundred people on the street-

  12. HS

    Yeah

  13. RC

    ... "Will that cause you pain?"

  14. HS

    Yeah.

  15. RC

    They'll say, "Yeah, of course it will." With your friend, for example, why would you say it did not cause pain?

  16. HS

    It's a question of what's most important. If you're running across the field and you break an ankle, you want pain. You need pain. Your brain is turning on pain. It's getting signals from your ankle. It's turning on pain to tell you, "Stop. Don't, don't run. Don't walk on a broken ankle. Get help. Get healed." But if you're running and someone's chasing you, [laughs] maybe you wouldn't get pain because the fear, the danger of being, being chased is greater than the, than the danger of the injury. And my friend who shot it, he was alone at a construction site, so he wasn't gonna get help if he just stands there i, in, in complete pain. So his brain kind of, it sounds weird, I know, made a decision, "Go to the hospital."

  17. RC

    Yeah. This is such a key point, Howard, because what you're proposing is fundamentally at odds with how most of the public and most of the medical profession look at pain.

  18. HS

    Yeah.

  19. RC

    And why so many conventional treatments don't work. And in your book, you say another myth is that people think that chronic pain is irreversible and incurable.

  20. HS

    Yes.

  21. RC

    Why is that a myth?

  22. HS

    Why that idea exists is because once pain becomes chronic, it's defined as three months, and certainly six months, a year, five years, you're getting assessments to determine the cause of the pain. And if you have a kidney stone, that's gonna be found easily. If you have appendicitis, it's gonna be found easily. You know, if you have a ear infection. So the, the, the medical treatments and certainly, you know, disease, medical tissue damage, pathology can cause pain. We all know that. But once you've passed three months, six months, a year, now you haven't been able to be diagnosed with something that's easily reparable. So now it's chronic. And the treatments that we've had in medicine for chronic pain like this are managing it, coping with it, rather than reversing it. Because they're viewed as the first myth [laughs] that it's, that it's structural, so we'll treat the structural damage, but you can't because you either can't find it or the treatments aren't effective.

  23. RC

    Yeah. Myth number three, physical findings are always indicative of tissue injury.

  24. HS

    Yeah.

  25. RC

    What does that mean?

  26. HS

    Well, if you've seen people with fibromyalgia, and all pain is real, okay? We're not saying that the pain is in people's heads, that it's fake, that it's their fault. No one with pain or the other conditions I talk about in the book should be shamed or blamed. No one. And the point of the book is to have compassion for people who are suffering. Once we understand that, that we need to have compassion and caring for people, then we need to look at them in their whole person, look at their whole life. So we'll talk more about that in a minute. But fibromyalgia is a disorder of sev- often severe pain, pain all over the body, horrible sometimes. Often, you know, thought to be incurable by traditional medical reasoning and... But these folks with fibromyalgia often have tender spots, so they're very tender in the body, all over, these different tender spots, and you push on them, it's tender. So there must be something wrong there because it's tender. But it turns out the brain can cause tenderness. And, uh, you're familiar with Lorimer Moseley, one of the-Australian, a great pain scientist, and he did a study with people with chronic back pain, and he inserted tiny needles in the muscles to, um, see where there was muscle tension and where there was not muscle tension. So what he found is that there was places where there was pain and muscle tension. So he goes, "Oh, the, the brain can cause muscle tension and can cause pain." But there were places where there was no muscle tension and pain, so the brain can cause pain in the absence of muscle tension, and then there were places where there was muscle tension but no pain. So the muscle tension isn't necessarily indicative of pain. Pain is generated by a, a decision, [laughs] that's so weird, a decision made in the brain.

  27. RC

    A subconscious decision.

  28. HS

    Yes, 100%.

  29. RC

    Why we're perhaps emphasizing this is because for many years patients have often felt that I've got really bad pain, whether that's in my neck or my back or my head or my foot, whatever it might be-

  30. HS

    Yeah

Episode duration: 1:27:05

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