You Can Rewire Your Brain to Eliminate Chronic Back Pain
A groundbreaking new study shows the remarkable efficacy of a brain-based treatment for chronic back pain. It provides new hope for a debilitating problem.
One in five Americans suffers from chronic pain, most often without receiving many benefits from invasive and costly treatments.
The most common type of chronic pain is chronic back pain- in 85% of cases of which no physical cause can be identified.
Dr. Yoni Ashar is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who studies psychological treatments for chronic pain. He recently led a study at the University of Colorado Boulder to determine whether a psychological treatment can eliminate chronic back pain — something no other therapy has ever before been scientifically proven to do.
“Our society predominantly thinks about chronic pain through a biomechanical, medical perspective. The most common treatments are physical; they’re injections or physical therapy, something targeting the body. What we’re learning more and more is that in many cases of chronic pain the problem lies in the mind or the brain. And we now have decades of research, both in neuroscience medicine and psychology, showing that there are a lot of changes that happen in the brain during chronic pain. In many cases, these can cause the pain to persist after an injury has healed.”
An important distinction that should be made when discussing chronic pain is that between the two types — primary and secondary.
“With secondary chronic pain, the pain is secondary to some medical problem or disease. With primary pain the pain is the primary problem, it is not secondary to anything else. What really is driving it are neuroplastic changes in the brain, and fear and avoidance. Fear is at the heart of chronic pain, so pain is a danger signal. The fundamental function of pain is to guide a person or animal away from things that are dangerous and when we perceive things to be dangerous that can amplify or even create this pain in our brains.”
Dr. Ashar likens primary chronic pain to a false alarm stuck in the “on” position. A technique called Pain Reprocessing Therapy or PRT, developed by pain psychologist Alan Gordon who was involved in the study seeks to silence the alarm.
“At the heart of PRT is learning to think and feel differently about your pain. What I mean by that is one: thinking differently about it, so understanding that the causes of the pain are non-dangerous, reversible brain changes — the pain is sort of a false alarm.
While it’s totally real, it’s due to these brain pathways that are firing that are not accurately reflecting the state of the body. The second piece of PRT is learning to feel differently about the pain, which what I mean by that is learning not to fear the pain and this happens on a more emotional level as well, but learning to change some of these automatic clenchings and tightening around the pain, learning to relax into it, because you know that it’s safe.”Â
In the University of Colorado study, 151 participants suffering from chronic back pain underwent four weeks of treatment with PRT. The results were extraordinary.
“What we found was a really large drop in pain intensity. Two-thirds of people in the PRT condition were pain-free or nearly so, at post-treatment, as compared to less than 20% of controls. So existing psychological treatments like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, generally aim to provide modest pain reductions and help people live more gracefully with their pain, they don’t really try to eliminate the pain. That’s one key thing that makes PRT different, is that PRT aims to eliminate the pain because it views the pain as being driven by reversible brain processes so it can be unlearned.”
Researchers were thrilled to find that the results held one year after treatment. Just what are the implications of these findings?
“What I believe we’ve been able to do in this study is take a similar treatment approach and show, in a well-conducted study, that it really works, that you really can resolve chronic pain with psychological treatment. The study shows that you can unlearn that pain and be pain-free, or nearly so.”
Thankfully, there are numerous therapists who are trained in PRT and can be readily found online. For researchers like Dr. Ashar, this study is a pivotal step towards changing the existing paradigm of how we approach pain and providing hard scientific evidence of the power of our minds to heal our bodies
Dr. Jack Kruse Explains the Importance of Sunlight Vitamin D for Health
Of all the health secrets, one of the most sought-after is how to optimize our health, and a common question is why health and healing have to be so complicated. But perhaps it doesn’t.
Neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse carries a simple message to think about how exposure to sunlight has gotten a bad rap over the past few decades and how our relationship to the sun is the key to staying well and energized.
Dr. Kruse says we seem to have forgotten that the sunlight’s system of photosynthesis supports most of the food chain on this planet. And, since our skin is derived from neuroectoderm (cellular structures associated with the brain and nervous system) we rely on the sun for photosynthesis to make vitamin D to protect our health. Vitamin D is too often overlooked by modern medicine in its role to keep us alive and healthy. Maybe, suggests Kruse, we need to rethink our position on Vitamin D and how we produce it.
Let There Be Light
In a recent interview, Dr. Kruse tells Regina Meredith that too many of us are continually exposed to artificial indoor light, causing us to miss out on vital factors required to boost the immune system and allow it to work optimally. Our bodies require the full spectrum of the sun’s rays to produce vitamin D, a hormone naturally created in our skin cells and used for myriad biochemical processes.
The Mayo Clinic explains that vitamin D is needed to regulate many cellular functions in the body and acts to support anti-inflammatory responses, antioxidant activity, nerve cells, the immune system, muscle function, and brain cell activity. Beyond this, explains Dr. Kruse, vitamin D is helpful in warding off viruses and bacteria, and helping the cells efficiently create and use energy.
Vitamin D is an overlooked nutrient, especially in northern climates where sunlight can be scarce for months at a time. Kruse links a number of health issues with vitamin D deficiency, including obesity, bone malformation, psoriasis, heart failure in the newly born, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, mental illness, diabetes, and even cancer, as well as most autoimmune diseases. Much of these health issues may be attributed to what Dr. Kruse calls a “quantum-biological problem,” meaning that it’s a story about sunlight and our relationship to it.
A fact of nature is that skin color, as well as other personal health factors, influences how much sunlight we need, which determines our state of health, the efficiency of the immune system, and the production of energy in our cells. People with darker skin need more sunlight than those with lighter skin to produce vitamin D. It’s not a racial problem, says Kruse, but rather a biological issue, despite how media may misinterpret it and how some physicians can misunderstand or overlook this fact. We have to be aware of our skin type and gauge our exposure to the sun accordingly, to glean the benefits of good health and to ward off a host of illnesses.
