Ep 41: Sarah Burrows – Reclaiming Life After Chronic Pain

Right.

So what was in the podcast? What was the secret sauce that you'd finally found?

So the podcast was with an amazing American doctor who has since become one of my mentors.

And his name is Howard Schubiner.

He's a MD in America, very experienced.

He was talking about the concept of neuroplastic pain and how the brain – can develop pain with the absence of structural injury or structural damage and that pain can be created by emotions and stress in our lives.

And it's very backed by neuroscience and a lot of research and it really made a lot of sense to me what he was talking about and I could see myself and the things that he was talking about

So it's basically saying there's nothing structurally wrong with your body, but your brain is sending pain signals still as a warning and as a caution that something needs to change.

Absolutely.

So what most people don't realise is that the brain makes a decision about everything that we do.

So even our vision is a decision that the brain is making.

Light comes in through our eyes, but actually most of the decisions about what we see is caused by the area of the brain that processes these things, not necessarily just through the eye itself.

And the same with hearing.

I mean, we all know those stories where we've sung along to the lyrics of a song and your husband might say, what are you singing? That's not the lyric, but that's what you've heard, right? So all pain is a decision that the brain is actually making regardless of the cause.

So if you fall over and you break your ankle, the pain that you experience is not caused by your ankle.

It's actually caused by your brain.

So- In a very, very quick process, the ankle will send a signal up through the spinal cord, the brain will make a decision, is this important? And hopefully in that instance, it's going to send a signal down to say, this is not very good, don't walk on your ankle.

And that's so we don't create more damage to that joint.

But what we know now through functional MRI scanning is that the brain can send messages to the body through symptoms or through pain in the absence of tissue damage.

So you found something that resonates and you've obviously found this podcast with this amazing American doctor.

Where to next?

So I actually contacted him and he's a very kind man and he replied very quickly, which is amazing because he's very well known and I'm sure very busy.

And I explained my story to him and he said, well, it does sound like I'd had all the tests.

I was the most tested person out there.

There was nothing structurally wrong with me.