What if the best way to treat your chronic back pain is by retraining your brain?
That’s the premise of a novel approach to chronic pain. Many people feel pain even after a physical injury has healed or when doctors can’t find a physical cause. The approach, called “pain reprocessing therapy,” tries to train the brain not to send false pain signals. Some early results are promising.
In a study published last year in JAMA Psychiatry, 66% of a group of people who did the therapy for a month were pain-free or nearly pain-free up to a year later.
The treatment is still largely in the research stages and typically not covered by insurance, but is being performed in a growing number of centers, including the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System, which plans to start two clinical trials of the technique next year.
“Most physicians are taught in medical school that pain is biomechanical in nature,” says Alan Gordon, founder of the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, who conducted many of the PRT treatments for the patients in the JAMA study. “This idea that the brain could… actually misinterpret the signals from the body as dangerous when they’re not is relatively new.”
A search for new approaches
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.