Sanjay Gupta

Do you have poor sleep?

What's your diet like?

What's the weather like outside?

Pain is a sensory, emotional experience.

Both.

And they added the word emotional into this not that long ago.

And as Robert Jensen, who's a doc at Mayo Clinic, said to me, chronic pain never occurs in isolation.

It always occurs with baggage attached.

And again, I don't want people to hear that and feel like, oh, now you're saying it's because of my depression.

Pain can cause depression, but depression can also cause pain.

But I think the point and the message that I really took away from that was you have to address both.

Acute pain is one thing.

You know, someone has a trauma or something like that, that's different.

But when the pain is lasting for a while, it always comes with baggage attached.

Maybe the pain is causing that baggage.

Maybe the baggage is exacerbating that pain.

But you have to address both.

And in the past, you know, I'm not the first person to say this.

People like John Sarno, they sort of alluded to this in his very provocative writings about psychosomatic issues and back pain.

This isn't to marginalize or minimize pain, but it is to highly recommend that people think about what else could be driving their chronic pain other than the sort of obvious thing.