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Tell Me About Your Pain

How Can I Tell if My Brain is Causing My Pain?

Tell Me About Your Pain

Curable and Alan Gordon LCSW

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.9903 Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Most chronic pain is caused by pain circuits in the brain that get stuck. But this can be hard to accept when pain feels like it's coming from our bodies. In this episode, Alan and Alon discuss how to determine if your pain is caused by your brain and explain why it's so important to embrace this belief. Alan talks to Greg, a former football player who always assumed his debilitating pain was caused by injuries to his back. By changing his mindset about the source of the pain, Greg completely overcame his symptoms. Alan also helps Denise, who suffers from multiple chronic pain symptoms, determine whether her pain is caused by her brain or by structural problems in her body.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Tell Me About Your Pain. I'm Alan Gordon and I'm Alon Ziv. This week, we're going to help you

0:08.9

figure out if your pain is being caused by your brain as opposed to a physical problem in your body.

0:15.3

And we're going to talk about why it's so important to make that determination. As always, we're excited to be doing this podcast in partnership with Curable.

0:24.5

Curable is an app for treating chronic pain.

0:26.9

And if you like our approach to pain, we think you'll like Curable's exercises and techniques.

0:32.2

You can check them out at Curablehealth.com.

0:36.7

So back when I had chronic pain, one of my symptoms was knee pain.

0:41.5

And I met with a doctor and I got an MRI and the MRI came back clean.

0:46.8

But it really seemed like there was something wrong with my knee.

0:49.8

So I convinced my doctor to get a 3T MRI, which is like twice as powerful as a normal MRI.

0:56.5

The images are even clearer.

0:58.9

And that came back clean.

1:01.1

And then I thought, maybe it's just too small for an MRI to pick up.

1:05.2

So I convinced my doctor to do exploratory surgery.

1:08.7

They made an incision in my knee.

1:10.6

They went in with like a microscopic

1:12.9

camera. They looked around for a while. And they still couldn't find anything. And I remember thinking,

1:19.3

maybe the camera just wasn't big enough. Wow. That's funny. I did not know that story. I mean,

1:25.4

I remember you getting a lot of MRIs. I remember when you had knee pain. I remember making fun of you for getting a lot of MRIs because I'm a good friend and joking that you were going to turn into a magnet. But I had no idea that you got exploratory surgery. Yeah, I didn't advertise it. But it was, it was so hard for me to be convinced

1:45.4

that there wasn't something wrong with me that I just like kept taking it to the next level.

1:49.7

Yeah, clearly. And, you know, of course, later you realize that there was nothing wrong with your

1:54.9

knee and that your pain was coming from your brain. And that's what we talked about in our last

...

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