An End to Chronic Pain? Surprising Science is Getting Us Closer. | Dr. Rachel Zoffness

I have been really curious about the mind-body connection.

Um, I feel like it's actually doing a disservice to, to actually use the phrase mind-body anymore because they aren't separate things.

Um, but, you know, one thing that is a, a fairly common experience for so many people, uh, as we get older is the experience of pain, either acute or chronic.

And oftentimes we're kinda told it's just a part of the process of getting older.

This is gonna ache more.

This is gonna hurt more, like, and just kind of deal with it.

And the understanding of what it is, where it's coming from is...

I feel like has gotten grayer and grayer.

W-what in your mind is the, the sort of like the most damaging myth that we believe about pain, the one that really keeps people stuck and suffering?

Oh, gosh.

There's, there's-

And you can name a few if, [laughs] if that's easier.

Yeah, I feel like there's a couple.

But the biggest myth about pain is this myth we're all sold that pain is a purely biomedical problem, and by that I mean something to do just with anatomy and physiology, your bones and your body parts.

And we have actually known for sixty-five years of really great neuroscience that pain is never purely biomedical.

Like, it never just lives in your body.

And one of the reasons we know this is because of a condition called phantom limb pain.

And have you heard of phantom limb pain before?

I have, but, but walk me through it.

Yeah, so phantom limb pain occurs when someone loses a limb, an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part.

And if you can have terrible pain in a leg that is no longer attached to your body, that tells us pretty definitively that pain isn't just manufactured by your leg.

Like, it doesn't, doesn't just live in your leg.

In fact, what we know is that pain is ultimately constructed by your brain.

But when you have chronic leg pain and you go to seven hundred and sixty-two doctors, we don't usually talk about your brain.

We don't usually talk about all of the factors that are going into maintaining and constructing your pain.