Dr. Rachel Zoffness

speaker

360 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Rachel Zoffness’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · How to Combat Pain · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Pain is ultimately constructed by the brain.

And one of the reasons we know this is because of a condition called phantom limb pain.

And phantom limb pain occurs when someone loses a limb, an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part.

Now,

If you can have terrible leg pain in a leg that is no longer attached to your body, that tells us pretty definitively that pain must be constructed somewhere else.

And we now know that somewhere else is the brain.

That's right.

So pain's job is to protect us.

There are people who do not feel very much pain and they don't live very long.

The problem is there's a very big difference between acute pain, which is three months or fewer, and chronic pain, which is three months or longer.

They are designed differently.

They work differently in the brain and nervous system.

And

They are treated differently.

And the problem is that we have a chronic pain epidemic.

We have 1.9 billion people around the globe currently living with chronic pain, 100 million in the US alone.

And because very few people understand pain, we continue to not just misunderstand it, but also to mistreat it.

Yes.

Mateo was sent to me by a surgeon who called me on the phone and he told me about a patient who was currently in his office and no amount of pain medication was working to lower pain volume.

And he said, I need your help.

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