Doctors and researchers have long been on a quest for effective treatments for chronic pain. Chronic back pain in particular is notoriously difficult to treat and experienced by millions of Americans. With doctors more wary of prescribing opioids, patients often now cycle through physical therapy, steroid injections and acupuncture, with surgery sometimes used as a last resort.
Some patients use techniques borrowed from mental-health therapy to try to manage pain symptoms, but researchers hope pain reprocessing therapy can go a step further by actually eliminating pain caused by off-kilter brain signals.
Before beginning pain reprocessing therapy, doctors scan patients to make sure the pain isn’t being caused by a physical injury or something else such as a tumor or infection, which are medical conditions that aren’t appropriate for pain reprocessing therapy.
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Therapists then talk with patients about their pain and the brain’s role in it. They encourage people to pay close attention to how the body feels. Patients use exposure techniques, doing gradual movements they think will cause pain to teach the brain that those movements aren’t actually harmful.
