Dr. Sanjay Gupta

They're always trying to treat the chronic pain like an acute pain, like an immediate pain.

But now it has all this baggage attached to it.

If you don't address the baggage, you're probably never going to be able to actually fully address the pain.

And, you know, look, this is a provocative area in pain medicine.

And there has been these authors before me like John Sarno, who anybody who knows, reads about pain will know that name because he wrote a book about back pain.

And he sort of really championed this idea of psychosomatic.

Yes.

And, you know, in his New York Times obituary, there was some line in there that said something like half the country thought this guy was a prophet and half the country thought he was a pariah.

Because the idea of saying, hey, look, your brain is deciding this.

All these different things play a role.

Some people thought you're minimizing my pain.

You're marginalizing folks who are in chronic pain.

I don't think that was his intent.

It's certainly not my intent.

But at the same time, this idea that, yeah, a psychologist maybe should be involved in dealing with your chronic pain because there's that baggage attached.

And that baggage, by the way, is a two-way relationship.

If you have more baggage, more pain.

But if you have more pain, you have more baggage.

I think sleep is a really good example.

A lot of people I talked to for the book said, I'm not getting good sleep because of my pain.