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@fourof5zs

@johnbishop

John
Could you give an overview of the article. I cannot read it unless I subscribe to The Washington Post.

ZeeGee

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Replies to "@johnbishop John Could you give an overview of the article. I cannot read it unless I..."

Hi ZeeGee @fourof5zs - I'm not a subscriber of The Washington Post but it lets me scroll through and read the article even though there is a subscribe button and sign in at the top right of the screen? Here's the last few paragraphs that sums it up.
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While the bulk of research focuses on back pain, there is good reason to believe that many other forms of chronic pain are neuroplastic. (Autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, may make up a separate category; they are similar in that they trigger overactive threat responses, but research hasn’t clearly shown whether psychological interventions can dial them down.) “I’ve seen thousands of people heal from dozens of chronic pain conditions with a mind-body approach,” says Nicole Sachs, a psychotherapist based in Delaware who specializes in eliminating neuroplastic pain. “One person’s back pain is another’s sciatica is another’s IBS is another’s migraines.” Her approach includes mindfulness meditation and expressive writing, which research suggests can reduce pain, perhaps because our brains perceive as threatening the surfacing of difficult emotions (a Freudian defense system updated for the age of brain science), which deep journal-writing invites us to unload.

Our culture and the health-care field have not caught up. Providers should learn about neuroplastic pain, and medical schools, which now spend an average of just nine hours on pain education, should teach about it. Critically, we must stop viewing emotional or psychological bases for pain as stigmatizing. This long-elusive goal might finally be reached through a broader understanding of the research showing that, in an effort to protect us, our autonomic nervous systems — not some character weakness or a wild imagination — are generating the symptoms.

One of the hardest parts of having chronic pain is the sense that your experiences or feelings are not valid. For too long, patients — especially women — have felt dismissed as neurotic when complaining of serious pain, and it would be a tragic misreading if the evidence on neuroplastic pain were misunderstood as an argument that chronic pain is imagined or the fault of the sufferer. The research shows the opposite: Chronic pain is real and debilitating — and since it’s learned by the brain, it’s usually reversible.
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Here's a YouTube TED Talk that does a better job of explaining what it is.
https://youtu.be/B_tjKYvEziI