Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Pain is in the brain.

If your brain doesn't decide you have pain, then you don't have pain.

And by the way, the flip is also true, which is the brain can decide you do have pain if

For no reason, people who have limbs that are missing, they have phantom limb pain.

How could that be that it's not even there anymore and it still hurts?

Or something known as chronic regional pain syndrome, which is basically pain in your hands or feet without any injury or any obvious trauma or anything.

So, you know, I start there often when I talk to patients, just sort of reminding them of that, that for some reason,

No fault of your own, but there's this memory loop that is continuing to get replayed over and over again that's causing that pain.

Let's address that in some way.

Addressing that baggage as much as you're addressing the pain.

I think one of the questions that I think a lot of people have is why?

Why does the body do that?

Is it a glitch of our central nervous system to just keep playing those memory loops?

If you talk to people like Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote this great book called The Body Keeps the Score, I think what Bessel would suggest is that there's something else that's probably happened in your life.

And maybe you can't remember it.

but the body keeps the score.

And maybe by addressing some of those things that perhaps aren't in conscious awareness for you, you're not thinking about day to day.

Like you're not thinking about why you're, you're just, your jaw hurts.

You're not thinking about why that might be necessarily.

Trying to treat the symptom more than the cause.