The view that chronic pain originates in the brain — that it’s fundamentally a psychological phenomenon, and can be eliminated by altering thoughts, beliefs and feelings rather than by changing something in the body or flooding it with chemicals — has long been controversial and is still largely dismissed as New Age hooey or offensive victim-blaming.
But what started out as a hunch by health-care practitioners on the fringe is finally being proved true by science.
The latest evidence comes in a peer-reviewed study just published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry that includes striking results from a randomized controlled trial conducted at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the study, 151 subjects with persistent back pain were randomly assigned to one of three groups.
A third of them were given no treatment other than their usual care (the control group), a third were given a placebo, and a third were given eight one-hour sessions of a new treatment called “pain reprocessing therapy” (PRT).
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Remarkably, 66 percent of the subjects receiving PRT were nearly or fully pain-free after this purely psychological intervention, compared with just 10 percent of the control group.
