Pain can be modified by your mind (EP21)

<p>Today’s <strong>Brain Booster</strong> is: <strong>Calm your fear, and pain will disappear.</strong></p><p>Last week I did a deep dive into pain, and the key points were that there are two types of pain, classified by their cause:</p><ol><li>Physical pain — caused by being punched in the nose (or some other kind of injury).</li><li>Neuroplastic pain — caused by an over-protective brain circuit. There’s no physical damage, no broken nose, and no pulled muscle, but your brain generates pain because it thinks you’re under some kind of threat.</li></ol><p>Following on from this, I’m going to answer some important <strong>whether </strong>questions from Peter.</p><p>How do I know <strong>whether</strong> my pain is physical or neuroplastic?</p><p>Last week you provided a comprehensive list of conditions — such as fibromyalgia, tension headaches and IBS — that were classified as neuroplastic, because there was no physical damage to a person’s muscles or head. This I can understand. But you also gave chronic neck, shoulder and back pain as examples of neuroplastic pain.</p><p>I’ve had chronic lower back pain for more than one year, and an MRI scan showed that I have disc degeneration, as well as a bulging disc. I also get intermittent shoulder pain, but no one can find a cause. Is my shoulder pain neuroplastic, or could the doctors be missing something?</p><p>I’d also like to know <strong>whether </strong>the principles of curing neuroplastic pain, could also reduce my back pain?</p><p>The majority of adults who are completely pain-free have what LOOK like severe structural issues on their MRI scans. These are famously referred to as ‘normal abnormalities’.</p><p>In other words, as we age, we all start to get grey hair, wrinkles, and disc degeneration.</p><p>None of these cause pain.</p><p>Grey hair does not cause pain.</p><p>Wrinkles do not cause pain.</p><p>And degenerative discs do NOT cause pain.</p><p>The belief that disc degeneration and herniation DO cause pain is one of the biggest misconceptions in modern medicine.</p><p>A massive systematic review published in the <em>American Journal of Neuroradiology</em> highlighted that normal abnormalities on MRI scans are almost ubiquitous findings in healthy pain-free populations. Tune in to learn how to distinguish physical back pain from neuroplastic back pain.</p><p>* * * * </p><p>Today’s <strong>Health Headline </strong>is: <strong>Pain can be modified by our mind</strong>.</p><p>The most famous example of