Dr. Sanjay Gupta

People will say, I don't want to go for a long walk or do something like that.

My back hurts.

I'm going to damage it more.

No, you're not.

If you've already checked that out and you can check that part off the list, like you're not damaging your back to go for a walk, then when you actually go for a walk or actually get mobile, you are probably going to actually help relieve your pain.

Think about recruiting those healing molecules to actually go to the site of your pain and help.

Chill out those nociceptors, decrease the amount of transmission going to your brain and help you feel better.

Yeah.

First thing I would say is I understand.

I get that.

That is a common way of thinking.

We looked at some studies that basically showed that if you could explain to somebody that their pain is being generated in a way that is not continuously assaulting their body, that there's not some toxic force inside their body, they're not going to damage themselves by doing these types of movements.

That seemed to really be helpful.

I think it was close to 60% benefit in terms of overall approach to how they were thinking about their chronic pain and their likelihood of actually moving instead of just lying in bed or resting all the time.

So it is an important conversation to have, but I think people often assume because pain is an alarm system that if I'm hurting that there's something wrong.

Yes, of course.

But at some point with chronic pain, it's not that there's anything wrong anymore.

Maybe it's a glitch in the central nervous system.

Maybe it's some repressed sort of thing, you know, like Bessel van der Kolk talks about.

But it's not a structural problem in your back.