Aug 26, 2026 · 51 min · 12 segments
Send us Fan Mail In this episode, i got the opportunity to interview a person I hugely admire. He is the person most responsible for putting…
Jon StoneGuest
Deepak RavindranHost
In this podcast where we dig into the science, the stories, and the human experience of pain.

I want to start today with a question that has genuinely changed the way I think about my work as a pain physician.

What if a significant number of patients walking through the doors of every pain clinic in the country, in the UK, in the world, had a condition that the pain team hadn't really been trained to recognize, the knowledge has been different, not because we weren't good clinicians or that we hadn't been taught, but because those two fields hadn't never simply sat down together and compared notes? I presume a lot of conditions come to your mind, but this condition I'm going to talk about is FND, functional neurological disorder, and a study published just a couple of years ago found that seventeen percent of consecutive new patients attending a general chronic pain clinic had a lifetime diagnosis of FND.

Now, FND is one of those terms that carries a lot of baggage, stigma if you will, and if you've trained more than ten years ago, as I have in the nineties, you might have been heard it de-described in different ways that felt stigmatizing, that felt dismissive, gaslit, or frankly unhelpful.

Have you thought about seeing a psychiatrist? Indeed, I think that is a challenge.

It affects how the brain processes and generates movement, sensation, and a variety of things, and I think for this, pain is a big part of the problem.

My guest today is the person most responsible for putting FND on a scientific map.

Since nineteen ninety-nine, he has published over four hundred papers, built the world's most widely used patient resource for FND called neurosymptoms.org, the one I've been using all the time.

He's President-Elect of the International FND Society and has been awarded the President's Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatry and the John Walton Award by the Association of British Neurologists.

But what I want to talk to John about today specifically is the intersection of FND and pain, because if you work in a pain clinic, in pain medicine community, rehabilitation, physiotherapy or primary care, secondary care, et cetera, this conversation is directly relevant to the patients you are seeing right now and looking after.
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