#199 UNLEARN YOUR PAIN - HOWARD SCHUBINER, MD | Being Human

[Music] welcome to this week's episode of being human i'm delighted to say i'm here with dr howard howard schuberth he is the director of the mind body medical center ascension providence providence detroit michigan he's the clinical professor at michigan state university he is the author of three books online your pain and learn your anxiety depression and a co-author with alan abbas of hidden from view and the author of a hundred papers and book chapters wow yes howard welcome to the show thank you uh it's nice to be uh admired i appreciate it you deserve some admiration that's quite an output um you were just saying before we came on that you're old and i was even if you're old that's that's a hell of a lot of uh you know writing you've done an impact you must have had so yeah uh honored to have you here thank you thank you so much it's fun yeah let's have fun yeah and uh yeah the book that i've taken a look through is unlearn your pain and your pain is is a big has been a big theme on this show um it you know its role in our lives and how we can heal from pain so yeah delighted to to dive into your take on on that topic um i get it'd be great to just get a little bit of a background um because obviously you're interested in you've got a traditional medical background at a certain level but you've taken a dive into the the realm of mind body which i guess from my perspective tends to be ignored largely by the medical establishment so be good to get a bit of your background and then how you became interested in in this this realm yeah yeah i would love to talk about that i uh i had an interest in mind-body medicine back when i was younger in my college years and then i've just been a kind of a regular doctor doing a variety of different kinds of practices in my career but about 20 years ago i read a book by dr john sarno called the mind body prescription a lot of people know about dr sarno he was never super well established in the sense of his work being accepted by mainstream medicine uh unfortunately that's still the case but nevertheless his book excited me i was very interested in it and i went to work with him for a little bit and i just started talking to people talking to them about their lives their symptoms their headaches their back aches their stomach aches and began to see this incredible correlations between what's going on in people's lives and what was going on in their bodies and for most people with chronic pain i learned that they don't have an actual structural abnormality to account for that chronic pain and that in and of itself is a shocking and revolutionary statement because most people who have chronic pain when they go to a doctor the doctor isn't going to say we don't know or there's nothing wrong they can't find anything wrong so it's it's led me on a journey for these last 20 years of exploration with my patients into what causes healing and what causes recovery from these conditions that are very real not in their head not made up but nevertheless we've learned that the brain plays a critical role in what we experience and that is like i say a revolutionary statement right yeah and and i mean there's a there's a whole tad in there that you've just said i'm sure we'll unpack as we go through i'm interested what were the was there a like the first example of a case you worked with or a patient where they started to click and and you found some resolution for a patient working in this way yeah there's one one woman really lovely wonderful person she was in her uh well at the time she was in her late 50s i think and she had headaches she had head pain severe chronic daily constant head pain for 17 years and no one could help her she'd been to headache clinics she'd had injections she'd had lots of different medications nothing helped her 17 years of this pain and what's a regular doctor going to do well the only tools i had was to talk with her and listen with her what i found when you heard her story was that her father was very unpredictable some days he would come home for work and be happy and other days he would come home from work and be mean or cruel he would grab her by her collar and scream at her what's wrong with you can't you do anything right and this imprinted on her brain this fear of unpredictability of of a you know a imposing uh you know authority figure but she did find throughout her life she got grew up she got married she had kids things were going well and then one day she got a new pair of glasses and when she put those glasses on you know how your eyes have to adjust to a new prescription and her eyes were adjusting and she got a head pain at that moment putting those new glasses on and it didn't go away for 17 years and they tried to change her glasses and the prescription and all those sorts of things but that had nothing to do with it and i asked her what was going on in your life at the time that you got those new pair of glasses 17 years ago and she said well my husband was fine my kids were fine my work was fine well she said i had a new boss my boss was i said what was your boss like she said well he was unpredictable at times he would be nice and kind and other times he'd be all of a sudden out of the blue screaming at me yelling at me could that be the cause of pain well it turns out our brain creates pain when it thinks we're in danger there's a lot of research now that we know for for certain that when a physical injury occurs it's not your finger causing pain when you touch a hot stove it's actually your brain so our brain creates pain when we when it thinks we're in danger and if we break an ankle our brain will usually create pain but not always sometimes people can have an injury and not have pain but we also know that the brain creates pain when it feels we're in emotional danger when the stress in our lives has built up for whatever reason that our brain feels we're in danger and pain is a message that our brain is sending us and what happens is is that that message and the pain can become reinforced over time and become become chronic because the neural circuits the circuitry of the brain that's causing that pain becomes learned becomes embedded becomes reinforced it gets worse and worse over time the more the more longer it lasts the more we fear it the more we focus on it the more the more we're frustrated by it the more doctors can't tell etc etc and that's what happened to her and in three or four months she was fine her headaches were completely gone because we had learned taught her how to interrupt the neural circuitry in her brain that was causing pain and that right it was just an amazing and moving story that has played out so many times hundreds if not thousands of times over the next 19 years right and and and what is that interruption mechanism how did you how did you train her to do that well it's basically has to do with how our brains and when i say our brains i'm talking about the neural circuitry of our brains our subconscious mechanisms that are constantly on alert constantly trying to protect us and help us see and hear and feel whatever it thinks we should see or hear or feel and this neural circuitry has a very strong connection to safety versus danger and so when our brain feels we're endangered it continues to send this kind of messages those signals get reinforced those that neural circuitry continues to to be activated into fire in our brains and it can cause headache or back pain or stomach pain or anxiety or insomnia or fatigue or depression or can can't think straight cognitive issues etc and what happens is is that when a child falls off a bike they look to you to see if they should cry or not and if and if the adult is afraid then the child is likely to cry because the child says oh my god this is a problem but if a child falls off a bike and they look to you and you smile and say oh my god that was interesting or that was fun can we do it again i mean you're okay buddy and then they they feel safe even though they just fell off a bike and the same process is the process that we teach people to do to teach and train their brain that they are actually safe and not in danger and then on top of that some people in addition benefit by dealing with the actual stresses that are causing the problems in the first place the emotions that may have been lingering or unprocessed from events that happened in the last week or the last month or decades earlier right and and were you doing a combination of these with this this woman and the relationship with that boss yeah usually usually we do a combination of those two it depends on the person some people need more of one versus more of the other um but you know most people benefit by this kind of two-pronged approach after we help them understand how the brain works this process that i've been describing called predictive coding our brain predicts what it should do and then creates it and the assessment determining if they actually have a structural problem or not if you know if they don't have cancer they don't have some inflammatory disease they don't have some infection or fracture you know etc we want to rule those out obviously because that's the role of that medical care can provide right and that is a that's a really legitimate role for i guess what you might say traditional medicine is its ability to look at that absolutely i i don't i never tell somebody they have a neural circuit issue or a mind body issue unless i'm absolutely sure right but we've developed a lot of criteria over the last several years of how to do that and oftentimes doctors are not really paying close attention to those kinds of criteria for example if someone has pain in their low back but they go on they go away on vacation and the pain goes away and then they come home and it comes back that's pretty strong evidence that they don't have a structural problem right right if the pain sometimes is in the lower back and sometimes is in the neck and it switches you know from day to day that's pretty strong evidence that they don't have a structural problem so you know we we pay close attention to those kinds of things yeah yeah yeah it reminds me of some work i i i did i used to get this really acute lower back pain when i was i'm i'm now you know stable relationship kids all the rest of it but when i was dating i'd get this really bad back pain right in the bottom of my lower back yeah and uh and it was like and it would it would be on dates or maybe just after days it was all around like in you know in the courting phase and and it and i traced it back to you know fear of intimacy with my mother and the fear and i had around my mother and some of that earlier uh early uh life experience and as i did more of that work through therapy i found that i got less and less of these random backgrounds when i was dating it yeah so i could relate to that example it's amazing when you can actually see that and frankly most people don't understand what you just said and what i just said most people really don't understand this connection or the power and the strength of these connections to cause real physical pain and other symptoms as i mentioned they don't understand it unless they've actually experienced it and then all of a sudden the light bulb goes on and go oh my goodness it is completely amazing but you know until enough people understand this we will continue to go down a path whereby all pain is considered to be structural where all pain is considered to be needed to be treated by medication or injections or even surgery and there's a lot of unnecessary suffering and a lot of unnecessary medications and injections in surgery which can be somewhat risky at times and certainly can be very expensive and often it's counterproductive because we're scaring people more and more when someone gets an mri of their neck or their back and it's red is showing degenerative disc disease those that's a normal finding it's not an abnormality it's normal to have degenerative disc disease even if you're 20 years old or 30 years old it's normal to have bulging discs if even if you're 20 or 30 years old and certainly and as as we age the spine shows these changes and we don't diagnose wrinkles as a disease but this is akin to diagnosing wrinkles of the skin in the spine as a disease and it is is it's it's it's dangerous really because we're we're telling people that they're that they're damaged or diseased and that creates more and more fear but more and more fear actually causes the danger alarm mechanism in the brain to go off even more so we're actually making people's pain worse by doing that right right yeah and a fascinating statistic that you cite in the book is that uh a predictor of a requirement for back surgery is job satisfaction right yeah um yeah there's a there's a really really wonderful nicely done study from um finland where they showed that people who were working in factories their the likelihood of getting musculoskeletal pain was not related to their actual physical activity it was related to how they were being treated by the people at work how their leadership was and so you know for people who run businesses if you want to reduce your disability of your workers if you want to improve lower turnover and improve decrease absenteeism and improve your bottom line you have to treat people well when you treat them well they're less likely to have to get physical pain and it's amazing yeah and the other one was around women uh if their workload was too high and they're experiencing some bullying there was a higher instant incidence of fibromyalgia biologists so yeah another yeah because you're you're you're piling on the stresses and at some point there's a straw that breaks the camel's back and the brain says enough you know basta this is not right you can't you can't do this anymore and it's really not that surprising i mean if you're a child and you're being bullied at school and you start getting stomachaches before school well hello of course your brain is is worried about that bullying and wants to protect you and the messages don't go to school but it happens in adults it happens in everybody because we all all have our brain that's trying to help us and protect us and send us messages of alarm when it when we're endangered and when you're in danger because of being sandwiched between work and home and kids and and spouses and and elderly parents may be in sickness and then the world goes crazy because there's some bizarre epidemic or something well and then financial stress you know comes on top of it worry about illness i mean all of a sudden guess what you have the makings of a danger alarm mechanism in the brain that can cause fatigue or anxiety or depression or insomnia or stomach ache or headache or back pain and you know not to be too controversial but the data that's coming out is suggesting that long long haul covet is more related to fear of covet than it is to actual virus infection or reaction to the virus and this is controversial when people are still studying it but there's a study from france where they have people who have long coveted symptoms and they have their blood tests to see if they actually had coveted or not and people who had long haul coveted symptoms were it was more common in people who didn't have covet than people who did have cove infection that's pretty amazing yeah leads to a lot of hope because these conditions are reversible as opposed to incurable there's a he imagine the difference when you're sitting with all this horrible pain or or can't concentrate or can't get out of bed and thinking that you're incurable being told that this is an incurable process we don't know why you're having it as opposed to saying yeah we know exactly why you're having your brain is turning this thing up it's not your fault you're not crazy it's not all in your head you're not imagining it it's real right but it's real because your brain is activating it and if your brain is activating it which has happened to you and it's happened to me too it happens to everybody it's something you mentioned your own back pain in the book absolutely so there's hope that's the point yeah and and what i like about your message here is is pain is a protector that not only are these not necessarily things for you to worry about and that they can be resolved but these are actually protecting you you know and in in a way the the this back pain i was getting i was getting on these dates it was it was literally you know don't get too close to this woman at some level it was trying to protect me exactly i mean i've seen for example i've seen women i i've seen several women who had a difficult husband first husband was difficult maybe abusive maybe emotionally abusive maybe worse and now they divorce the jerk and now they're in a new relationship and they're just about to get married now the second husband is great right good guy great guy a great relationship everything's good but now they but before the wedding they start getting these symptoms they start getting headache or they start getting stomach pain or diarrhea or urinating all the time or all sorts of stuff right and why would their brain do that well the brain is like hey it didn't work out the first time don't do it right and so we have to understand the message and understand that your brain is just afraid for you yeah you know it's not the enemy the pain is not the enemy it's it's just an alarm mechanism where a smoke alarm is loud because it has to get our attention but we don't get mad at the smoke alarm it's just doing its job when there's a little bit of smoke maybe there's only a tiny bit of smoke but the smoke alarm goes off well maybe you know the second husband is a great guy and it smoke the smoke alarm doesn't need to go off but the brain's like well i better sound the alarm just in case yeah yeah and it leads to a different set of questions about the pain it's not so much you know where is this pain what is this pain about how can i how can i fix or get out of this pain it's like well why am i it's a different it's it's curiosity but directed in a different way why am i having this pain how could this be protecting me what could it be protecting me from it it leads to a different inquiry a totally different inquiry and again like you said earlier it starts with the role of traditional medicine making sure that there's nothing wrong but traditional medicine needs to be educated to not over diagnose pains as structural illnesses when they're actually not right and your example being the bulging discs you might be able to make a case in your mind that this is structural when perhaps it isn't yeah exactly exactly i have a i just got an email today from a patient of mine a very nice great great woman who was having back pain and it was very obvious the pain was due to neural circuits in her brain there was nothing wrong with her back she got better she was doing fine she emailed me she said oh my back pain came back and i went to get an mri and i got some injections and now they want to do surgery and i'm like why didn't you you know you know about the mind-body connection we've been through it why did you go down that path when i'm right here you could have called me we could have seen you i could evaluate your mris i can help you but it was like this there's a strong tendency to equate pain with physical injury and physical damage because that's how we've been living for thousands of years but you know when you think about it i heard this podcast the other day it really was interesting to me because they were saying that you know basically that back in the day you know like thousands of years ago humans survived because they were a clan neanderthals were stronger smarter faster better hunters they didn't survive humans survived probably because they worked in groups they connected they they spoke you know they used language they used they developed fire they cooked you know they hunted together whatever and so you would be in danger of your life if you got kicked out of the clan but why would you get kicked out of the clan because of emotional issues you know you you beat up somebody or sleep with somebody's wife you know whatever you you act bad and you get kicked out that's that's you could die so your our brains learned in essence that physical danger breaking an ankle is is dangerous and they also learned that emotional danger is dangerous and pain became one of the ways that our brains activated the message of alarm in both physical injuries and emotional injury right right it's like we co-opted a circuit that was originally evolved for something else to help help us uh moderate i suppose our social behaviors yeah i i think that's the case i mean you know it's hard to prove right yeah it makes some sense and uh yeah it uh it's uh it's really powerful and it's interesting how you're saying you want to check the physical first but what i've noticed in my own sort of development i got onto this fairly early in my in my 20s is now when i get physical pain i actually do the reverse like my first inquiry is could this be you know emotional could this be psychological and then if i exhaust that i then may think okay maybe it's structural right and there's that and that's reasonable i mean i what people always ask me well how am i gonna know if i'm actually injured and i usually say well use the mom test you know are you did you fall is something broken are you bleeding uh you know is this an emergency you know i mean if you're having all of a sudden you've got this horrible pain in your side and there's blood in your urine now you probably have a kidney stone you know you need to go to the hospital right right right right yeah um where to go next with this um okay so i guess i suppose what's interesting to consider is why do you think medicine has has developed this as you describe it the book the blind spot what why do you think we have this well uh you know medicine has advanced tremendously and a lot of these advances have come through um kind of debunking some old ideas some psychological theories that were overreaching you know and there's a there's a story i read recently where freud had a uh and i don't i don't want to bash foreign but you know he deserves some bashing i think but anyway he had a patient a woman who was who was bleeding and having nosebleeds and he had diagnosed her as having some kind of psychological issue and it turned out she had you know she had a tumor or something in her nose you know and i was like hey you know and people used to think that epilepsy was was psychological in origin or you know things like this so there's there was an overreach i think in in psychosomatic theories and as medicine advanced we learned that you know ulcers could be caused by a bacteria we learned that epilepsy can be caused by disease of neural electrical activity in the brain you know we learned that um you know about germ theory and everything so there's been a tendency to just keep going along this biotechnological path and it's led to incredible great advances we can do we're so much doing doing so much better with with heart disease with heart attacks we're doing so much better with cancer uh the two major causes of death in society but we haven't had impact on chronic pain in fact chronic pain is worse now than it was a couple decades ago oh really i didn't know that there's more back pain in the u.s than there was a couple decades ago and more back pain occurring in younger people teenagers were getting back pain at unprecedented rates that they never had yes but what also is increasing in the society is anxiety and depression yeah so when you take chronic pain anxiety and depression these are the the major causes of disability in the world by far these are the major causes of of disability and suffering in the world even though the causes of death remain as cancer and heart disease and cerebral vascular disease so biotechnological medicine hasn't been able to solve this these problems that we're talking about here and so now we're going back and looking back taking the best of psychology not overreaching but also looking at the advances in neuroscience the advances in neuroscience have been amazing over the last couple decades in terms of this understanding that our brain generates what we experience right right and and so it it's almost as if there was a world view and a set of dogmas that that that trembled research in a certain way and we're now starting to see the limitations of that yeah and and and and i suppose it's interesting to consider how these will coexist though right and where where we'll end up in terms of a rebalancing yeah exactly i think it is rebalancing and more and more people are are learning about it and finding out about it because there's a tremendous need there's a tremendous need but there's a lot of resistance too because the whole the whole medical profession is built on um a dogma as you say and and financial interests and all these centers that are doing things one way and i learned several years ago i learned that when you go to people that are doing it one way and you say hey you're doing it all wrong they usually it's not usually a message that's taken well and uh you know and i and i admit i've been maybe i haven't been as uh as tactful as i should be you know so you know it's it's it's hard to it's hard to tell somebody they're doing something wrong when that's what they've been doing that's what they learned and it seems to be working for them right and a lot of it must be in the medical training i mean i saw just just today on social media a rant copy pasted from reddit about a medical student just bashing his entire medical training and how how narrow it was uh but your professor right so you so you must have some insight into how well at least in the states mds are being trained right now like what is it is that shifting at all it's uh you know in terms of our area in terms of particularly education about neural neuroscience and and pain there's very little in medical education that's given to pain and most of the lectures on pain now have to do with opioids and and safe uh prescribing of opioids and dangers of opioids that's where almost all of the education is and at our medical school michigan state we have just instituted a small bit of this into the curriculum exactly what we're talking about today the mind body connection pain i'm working mike my wonderful colleague at dalhousie university ellen abbas has just got the go-ahead to to put in a larger block of this kind of material into the medical school there but medical school curriculum is fulfilled it's full i mean there's a lot to learn there's tremendous amount of stuff to learn that medical students are bombarded by so uh you know it's a i would say it's a slow transition right right and and then the other thing that comes up a lot and i know this isn't an area of focus for you but nutrition and its role well in mind body as well right i mean we are what we physically and mentally to some degree right there's a lot there's a lot that's being learned about the uh the gut biome and how that affects behavior uh there's no question about that um i i'm a bit of two minds about that i would say uh there's a lot of evolving uh information which is fantastic and hopefully we'll be able to use uh someday uh but on the other hand i'm a little bit leery of of people promoting the idea that your food you know what you eat is actually causing back pain or headaches or stomach pain because usually it's not sometimes what happens is people begin to fear food and when you fear food you're activating the fear mechanisms and the fear mechanisms cause pain so we have to again be balanced i think along these lines because what we're dealing with is that remember i said i was talking about the brain operating in fields of safety or danger and so all kind of interventions are likely to have a placebo effect or a nocebo effect so a placebo effect for example i just today i saw a advertisement for a new migraine treatment a new device that treats migraine that's been quote approved by the fda here in the states and what it is is it's a strap you put on your arm and there's a battery and it sends signals it sends electrical charge to your arm and that's going to interrupt migraines i mean it's silly right but it not to say it can't be effective it can be effective because of a placebo effect because the placebo effect can be extremely powerful if you have a mind-body disorder all you need is a good placebo migraine can go away when you shock your arm if your brain is staying oh this will make me safer this will work yeah some kind that's the placebo effect i use the placebo effect all the time that's what we need mind-body treatments need a good placebo effect there's an ocebo effect which is the opposite so if you think something's going to be harmful in your brain it will more likely cause more problems and so we're always operating in this in this way and we want i mean i want people to enjoy eating as opposed to being fearful of eating because i want people to enjoy their life and when they enjoy their life then they're calming the danger signal in their brain they're making themselves feel safer happier more purposeful have more meaning um connect to others these are the things that heal yeah yeah and it reminds me of of that study in the u.s city of two italian communities and they couldn't figure out was one was much healthier than the other they had the same you know american italian diet it turned out one group were much more socially active yeah yeah until your point probably had a lot less fear and contentment and higher levels of contentment in their day-to-day lives and so things are healthy nothing to do with the food and we're so fearful in our lives in so many ways and we're fearful and then and then you know because of stress we get a pain and then we start being afraid of the pain and then it snowballs right right right right and is that and so you i mean the second half of your book you you outline this uh this 28-day process process and and meditation features you know throughout the process uh yeah why is meditation so important well it's it's a way of calming the brain you know it's a way of stepping back and there's a variety of simple meditative techniques that we use to interrupt the cycle of pain leading to fear of pain leading to more pain so i've been t i've been a teacher of mindfulness meditation for 22 years now and everyone should learn mindfulness it's an amazing way to help navigate our uh the world um but the research on mindfulness for pain hasn't been that shown it hasn't been that effective which is weird why would that happen and my belief is it has to do with the categorization of the problem so if you're categorizing your back pain or your head pain or your stomach pain as a structural problem and you're using mindful and most people would do that because that's what the medical profession is telling you and then you use mindfulness to help deal with that you're you're you're noticing the sensations but the underlying problem is still fear because you think you're structurally damaged but our method is to reconceptualize and re-categorize the cause of the sensations the cause of the pain and when you reconceptualize and re-categorize it based on good medical evidence that it actually is neural circuits in the brain as opposed to structural damage now when you apply mindfulness it can be extremely effective because now you've categorized this pain as a thought basically and mindfulness is extremely effective for noticing thoughts accepting thoughts as just thoughts letting them go and observing them right i mean that's amazing that my mind is perfect for that so so meditation can play a a very large role uh in this process when used within the setting of knowing this neural circuit situation so that's interesting so the education like the understanding of the patient makes a difference if i if i understand my pain in this way then it's easier for me to to believe that meditation could work and engage with meditation as a healing act get act and that it then becomes self-fulfilling exactly you're here you know you're having a positive spiral as opposed to a negative spiral i mean i often say that i'm basically a faith healer i get people to believe that they're not broken i get people to believe they're not damaged and then they heal faith healing you're a faith hailing kept have you kept your career as a professor that's that's that's fantastic yeah yeah but that yeah that makes a lot of sense and you can see if i'm still categorizing my pain as being structural and physical and i'm doing the mindfulness and it's not going away i'm like well why i'm doing this mindfulness i've still got the pain you know you could see the negative cycle though yeah exactly exactly yeah i've had i had a i had a wonderful discussion with my teacher and don cabot zen who was really one of the foremost people in in helping mindfulness become accepted in in the west and uh i revere him he and i love him and i had a conversation with him saying you know hey john you know i've been doing this mindfulness for years and i i i love it it's changed my life but it actually doesn't really work for pain that much he goes oh really like let me explain right right and then and then to that the other techniques that you bring in is journaling and forgiveness acceptance so the dialogues that you introduce is that why why that as well as well as the meditation well that falls under the category of dealing with the stressors that started the pain in the first place and the stressors that may be feeding the ongoing pain going on you know if you're having situations with your boss your neighbor your your in-laws your children uh if you have situations where you were traumatized in the past there's a lot of different ways of dealing with that those emotional hurts and the more people can and there's a lot of different ways of doing that there's a lot of different therapies for that and we've picked some of the ones that we think can be useful especially useful for people even on their own such as expressive writing um as ways of helping to uh process those situations to help people to be less traumatized less emotionally upset uh feel safer in their in their life right right so so part of the approach is dealing with the underlying stresses and part of it is is relaxing the mind finding ways to quiet the mind and i guess building an understanding of how this pain process works in the brain exactly exactly and uh you know like i say with you know when you have all treatments work i think in this field by having some kind of explanation having techniques which go to that explanation doesn't matter if the explanation is true like explanation could be your chi is unbalanced and the technique is acupuncture well that can work because if you have a caring connection to a provider and you have hope for healing you have four elements an explanation a technique a caring provider and hope and optimism that defines the placebo effect so you can have fantastic outcomes when you incorporate those in ways to help people understand their problem what we're saying is we we want help we want to help people understand how the brain works and this mind-body connection but there's lots of other ways that people can get better never really considered it in that way and that makes sense then why there seems to be so many so just this panoply of modalities that seem to be effective for people and and how people get well it's like there's as many ways to heal as there are fingerprints it seems yeah i mean and and they all have these characters and maybe there's others but at least these four four characteristics that lead to healing and recovery and so go through them again it says it's the belief it's the it's an explanation yeah it's some sort of explanation for what the problem is if you're in if and then some technique to address that problem in physical therapy they say well your your glutes are not firing or your abs need to be stronger so we'll give you exercises for it okay makes sense and then you have a caring person who's going to help you do that and then you have hope and optimism that you're going to get better and so that can work with acupuncture with physical therapy it can work with psychotherapy you know it can work with um medications right you get you know the little zapier arm there was a there was a treatment for uh menstrual cramps i saw online a couple years ago and there was a little little these little plastic flowers that women would put on their lower belly and it was attached to a nine volt battery same kind of thing oh cure for menstrual cramps and uh you know they did a like a kickstarter campaign they raised like three million dollars to to put these little battery shocks on your on your abdomen i mean has nothing to do with menstrual cramps but that's not to say it can't work it can work if it makes sense it's something to do and you're making your brain feel safe it'll work for some people wow yeah yeah and it's it's kind of an assault to the ego you do as you share this because there's a bit of me that wants to hold on to the fact you know the way that i've done it has to be the way yeah we're you know one of the things that i learned that i've tried that i i'm continually trying to learn is be humble you know we don't we don't have all the answers we you know we're doing our best we're doing this we're doing this work with caring and kindness and compassion and we we need to do it with humility as well because you know everybody has their own path everybody has different ways of healing uh you know we're we're just trying to do good in the world richard that's right that's right and what do you find in terms of the patients that tend to have is success at least with your process what are the characteristics of of the patients who do well i would say first and foremost it's kind of a it's an openness to these ideas a lot of people have taken my book or dr sarno's books and read the first few pages and you know threw it against the wall and discussed um i i i got an email a couple about a month ago from a guy in britain who's a scientist a researcher super smart guy and uh you know he was having back pain and someone said hey you should read this book by dr sarno and he looked he looked at the book he goes this is a bunch of hogwash you know this is a bunch of what do you say in britain you know well there must be a better term for her yeah hogwarts is a very american so i hope be reasonable what would be the later i load a bullet a load of old bollocks bollocks there you go yeah bollocks and uh and uh and then he went on amazon he looked at the reviews they were like you know ten thousand five star reviews for this book and he's going some people really liked it so he got it and he read it and it started to make sense for him and he started to get better and now he's planning now he and i are doing a little bit of research in this area together so wow there has to be an openness even if initially you're skeptical there has to be at least some amount of openness to just take a look because and so one thing is openness the other thing is desperation you know a lot of people have tried so many other things and they're desperate to say i'll try anything at this point so that helps to make them more open and then and then being being willing to engage in the in the treatment being willing and it's hard sometimes because the process is often very simple but it's not always easy you know for you to have pain and you to notice your pain without reacting to it to notice your pain and smile at it to notice your pain and and um separate from it to notice your pain and um and just remind yourself you're okay and you're safe and this is temporary to notice your pain and say oh i can take it i can handle this to notice your pain and feel it without without freaking out that is a skill that not everybody finds easy uh to do at the beginning yeah yeah yeah that makes yeah that makes so much sense yeah and along my journey it's yeah you can often find people with the with the first two um you know they've got a level of of openness you know they're prepared to do the work but can they really face the the pain yeah not always yeah and or face the emotion some of the emotions yes emotional situations in their lives that that can be difficult as well so what we're doing is we're just trying to provide people with an understanding give them the options to look at it if they want to give them a space of caring and compassion uh letting them know they're not crazy it's not all in their head it's not their fault um that their symptoms are real not imaginary and the education about the brain how the brain can be causing these real things and the hope that they can get better yeah that's what that's what we're starting with and for a lot of people they're so happy and they're saying why didn't other doc why didn't my doctors tell me about this why don't why don't why doesn't everybody know about this you know i'm so glad it's not in my head and i'm so glad that it is in my brain i mean that is an amazing place to come to and understand because it's really an understanding of how their human body works how the human brain works that we now know and neuroscientists know this now this isn't just the theory we know this now but it hasn't really transfused not or i'm not sure translated or something hasn't gotten into modern mainstream medicine quite yet yeah quite yeah but yeah i'm getting a cr increasing number of people coming on this podcast you know with real hope that we're at the start of a major transition back to hope actually right if you want to look at it at this meta level can we can we have hope as a collective as a community so things are changing and that uh yeah the old dogmas are starting to to loosen and we can we can start to explore uh yeah explore our humanity in a different way i mean yeah i've got a huge hope for that yeah well that's what you're doing here and being human right exactly yeah i mean it's turned out that's been a big part of what you know the mission of this podcast has now become is to kind of encourage this conversation encourage this openness give hope um you know give options for people to take action right yeah and it's exciting it's an exciting time to be around yeah yeah and and on that note i know you've got to run to another another engagement um in terms of options for action uh people could check out you know your book unlearn your pain um yeah it's all laid out and you know especially this education of how the brain works i think that's really powerful and then you've got the whole program and yes as we said at the start you've got another one on your anxiety and depression for people who are particularly afflicted with that um is there anywhere else you might point people who have been interested in what there's there's a couple of um non-profit websites that are there's one called ppdassociation.org you're right isn't paul diaz and dog ppd association.org which is a nonprofit professional group that we started uh has a lot of information uh there's another one called tmswiki.org not a professional organization but a peer run organization of people who've been in pain and had other of these types of symptoms or syndromes and have formed together to have a clearing develop a clearinghouse of information on this work so those are two i would highly recommend brilliant okay we'll put links to that in the description fantastic well thank you so much for your time uh this is this has been a fantastic conversation i hope people get a lot out of it it's a pleasure we'll uh we're trying to get we're trying to get this work out of the category of bollocks [Laughter] and into the category of accepted uh science so your thank you for helping along this way yeah here's to more unbollocksifying of the mind-body connection there you go all right thank you so much cheers

Channel: Being Human Podcast

Views: 79,256

Keywords: beinghuman, firsthuman, podcasting, richard atherton, howard schubiner, unlearn your pain, pain, therapy, mind body approach, pain relief, howard schubiner unlearn your pain, howard schubiner chronic pain, howard schubiner anxiety, anxiety, unlearn your pain book, unlearn your pain audiobook, howard schubiner summary, howard schubiner review, unlearn your pain podcast, unlearn your pain summary, heal chronic pain, chronic pain, stress illness, dr. schubiner, dr. howard schubiner

Id: qINdA6E14Sk

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022