Episode # 118- Pain is a Danger Signal

New pain science teaches something different than what I learned in Physical Therapy school  20 years ago.

 

Pain is not directly related to the amount of injury present in the body.

 

Pain does not indicate tissue damage, but rather pain is a danger signal.

 

Research into chronic pain shows the brain actually processes it differently once it’s lasted past 3-6 months.

 

There are 44 areas of the brain associated with chronic pain, and the main one is the center of learning and memory.

 

Just as pain can become learned, it can become unlearned - through pain Reprocessing therapy (PRT)

 

Listen for more info and research about how pain is a dangerous signal, and how it can be unlearned by PRT.

 

Plus click below for my special PRT-based group if you have back or neck pain specifically.

 

This six month group will walk you through PRT concepts, the latest research on back and necks, and even individual coaching sessions for deeper somatic work- all for an amazing low price:

 

https://www.bodyandmindlifecoach.com/happy-back-&-neck-club

Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 118, Pain is a Danger Signal. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life. Become unstoppable body and mind. Hello, my loves. This episode is about a basic concept in pain reprocessing, that pain is a danger signal. And if you are suffering from chronic back or neck pain, stay till the end and listen, I have something special for you. So basically this idea, this concept, that pain is a danger signal, is something that I recently learned. And I was a physical therapist for 20 years. I worked with people in pain, a lot of people in chronic pain, but I never knew there was a distinction between the types of pain. When an injury is new and just healing, like if someone sprains their ankle and it's healing, that's different. It's actually processed differently and different parts of the brain light up than when pain becomes chronic, which generally they consider three to six months. That's the normal healing time. Actually, a bone's normal healing time is six to 12 weeks. So within about three months, even a bone has healed. So we know our body can heal, it knows how to heal, and we also know from brain scans of people with chronic pain that it's processed differently in the brain. And we also know now that all pain is produced in the brain. So the signals from the body come up to the brain for processing, and the brain determines what is important enough to send pain down to in the body. So imagine that someone is being chased by a tiger and sprains their ankle. They are not even going to feel the pain of the sprained ankle as they're running from the tiger for their life. But when they are in a safer situation, they will feel that ankle pain so that they stop walking on it and tend to the injury. So we know that pain is not related to the amount of injury, and actually many studies of pain-free people have now confirmed that. There have been studies of over 3,000 people who do not have back pain, and they find that things like disc bulges and herniations and degeneration and facet impingement, spondylolisthesis, so many different things that they used to say were causing pain are actually found in pain-free people. One study found that 64% of people with no back pain had disc bulges, protrusions, herniations, or disc degenerations. So the m