Welcome back, confidants. My sweet confidants, I am going to get right into it since this is part two of the episode with Dr. Rachel Zoffness.

She is a chronic pain specialist. She is teaching us all about the way we can change our pain. If you have not listened to part one, pause this right now. Go back to the episode before this from last week.

Listen to everything there because we really dove into like the science of pain, how the brain perceives pain and most importantly, how we can change it.

So this is a continuation of that conversation, a little bit more depth, a little bit more specific, a little bit more detailed. Doc, thanks for coming back.

Dude, I love hanging out with you. It's great.

I love hanging out with you. This is just like friendship time for me. I'm just like selfishly getting out all the things I need to get from you.

It's very, I appreciate your energy and willingness. Yeah.

Alright, so let's jump right into it because we've already discussed like the basics, the 101s of pains. I want to get a little bit more niche.

I want to ask the first question about something that I've recognized to be surprisingly controversial, which is the pain behind fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.

So I've been reading, oh gosh, what's the book called? I'm going to fuck it up.

But I've been reading a book that's talking about how like Lyme disease is basically nowhere near being cured or like nowhere near being even projected and portrayed as what it's understood in the CDC.

And it's, it's just like a clusterfuck. And then a lot of fibromyalgia can be traced back to Lyme or Lyme-esque bites.

And I'm just, my mind's being blown away because fibro feels so mysterious. And I know I just garbled a whole bunch of shit at you.

So I'll stop and let you just talk about the mystery that is fibro and Lyme and pain.

I have questions about your question. Okay. Okay. Okay. So there's, there's like a million things that cause chronic pain, right?

There's like, you know, so I actually sat down once and tried to make a list because when I wrote, I wrote the pain management workbook, right?

And for a while, I was like, do I need to have different sections for different conditions? And I tried to make a list.

There are so many things that can trigger chronic pain. So now, you know, when I talk about pain, I sort of talk about it in this broad sense because pain is this ubiquitous human experience that can, you know, go along with any chronic illness or any chronic condition or

there is a lot of controversy around fibromyalgia. There is a lot of controversy around Lyme.

I am not a specialist in Lyme, but I will say in the chronic pain world, both of those conditions are sort of known as like when healthcare providers don't know what you have, I'm sure you've been down this road.

Also, they will sometimes lump you into this chronic pain category. And sometimes you will get lumped into the Lyme or fibromyalgia category because it almost becomes a diagnosis of exclusion.

Like we're not sure what else is going on. And you know, you fit certain symptoms and criteria. And with fibromyalgia, it used to be, I'm gonna see if I can remember this correctly.

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