Going Deep with Rachel Zoffness on Pain Management

Kelly Corrigan Wonders

Kelly Corrigan Show

Society & Culture

4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I have had migraines so bad that I ended up in the ER, so my interest in this episode was personal. Turns out so much of the country is in chronic pain that it is a major national issue affecting economic considerations like productivity and health care costs and existential considerations like depression and hopelessness. Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist who is reframing our understanding of what pain is and therefore how better to treat it. Given the numbers of people who live in pain, I think this might be one of the most important conversations we have shared.

This conversation was had on the set of my PBS show Tell Me More. Special thanks to the wonderful people at Amerihealth Caritas.

Rachel Zoffness’ excellent book can be purchased here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan and today I'm
0:07.9	wondering about pain. It is in many ways still a mystery, but a mystery with such serious consequences.
0:16.0	Chronic pain, pain that is at best something people just have to manage forever, more than a quarter of Americans.
0:27.0	That's a huge swath of our population in discomfort
0:31.0	and sometimes in despair.
0:33.0	Dr. Rachel softness wants to reset our popular understanding of what pain is and therefore what the better treatments might be. I sat down with Rachel to talk for my
0:46.2	PBS show Tell Me More. So join us for Kelly Corrigan Wonders and a very helpful
0:52.3	conversation with pain psychologist Dr Rachel's
0:56.0	offness. Oh, Welcome back to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan. We know that there are
1:19.3	some fundamental factors like sleep, nutrition and movement that make learning easier.
1:26.2	Ditto work.
1:27.4	Ditto the core relationships that set the tone of our emotional lives.
1:31.7	But as any of the 100 million Americans in chronic pain
1:36.1	right now will tell you, nothing is possible when a body aches. Pain
1:42.2	controls lives.
1:43.8	It crushes productivity and creativity.
1:46.3	It strains relationships.
1:47.5	It can lead to addiction and sometimes suicide.
1:51.0	And the way we understand it determines the way we treat it, which according to Dr.
1:55.9	Rachel Zofnus is all wrong.
1:58.8	Rachel Zofnus is a pain psychologist, assistant clinical professor at UCSF a lecturer at
2:04.2	Stanford and a scientist on a mission to reset our conception of what pain is
	...

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