“We want to halve the pain of a billion people, then halve it again, and again.”
We’ll do this by helping patients and clinicians to better understand the science of pain, what works, and what we can all control .
“Pain is a Social Disease.
Pain doesn’t just affect the person suffering the pain. It affects their family, their friends, and their community. By halving the pain of one billion people, we not only change millions of lives, we change our society.”
Dr Dan Bates
No one is happy with the current management of chronic pain.
Everyone blames someone else for their unhappiness, whether patient, doctor or carer.
Pain is complex, time is limited, resources are scarce, people are individuals, and clinicians have biases and specific skill sets.
The cure for blame is responsibility, improved empathy and communication, and knowing where you fall on the therapeutic spectrum.
INiYH Podcast is about taking ownership over your experience and empowering patients to control all they can, while helping clinicians better treat different types of pain.
Putting everyone in specialties makes it even harder to see the patterns in complex patients. But by finding a way to organize such bizarre stories and unexplainable symptoms, we can make sense of these presentations.
For patients
Patients need to be able to make more informed decisions, ask the right questions, communicate more effectively, and think about pain in a way that doesn’t perpetuate hopelessness. Being told different variations of ‘it’s in your head’ diminish very real symptoms and create feelings of being gaslit that can eventually lead to unacceptable harm including suicide.
But once you understand how pain works, personal ownership and the concept of radical responsibility become powerful. We want to empower patients to take back what pain has stolen from them and be the boss of their own care team. Shifting the locus of control to what you must impact as a patient, while knowing how to outsource for the appropriate support, yields the best outcomes long-term. Patients cannot do everything, but they need to know how to help help themselves in all the ways they can.
Justine’s MARSMethod turns the volume down on your pain system through unique movement strategies and conservative management techniques that dial in lifestyle habits around mindfulness, nervous system regulation, nutrition, sleep, energy and stress management, so you develop the tools and mindset necessary to attack the pieces of pain you control - particularly with the consequences of sensitization and long-term compensation patterns. Her methods, born out of her own experiences with pain and work with complex patients, are crucial to more effectively down-regulate amplifiers of pain so you can rely less on medications and interventions.
“You have to be willing to change who you are to deal with pain. Figure out what you can and can’t control, and go all in on crushing the pieces you can.”
— Justine Feitelson
For providers
Lets be honest. Treating pain is really hard. It is taught as a symptom of a disease process, rather than a disease itself, and has been recently explained in neuroscience terms that are equivalent to saying the “color blue” is in your head. Which when you consider light waves in the blue spectrum hitting the retina, being converted into an electrical signal, transferred via the optic nerve to the occipital cortex, and translated into the perception of “Blue”, then the color “blue” is technically in our heads. But it is not useful. Translating that to nociception and pain for patients becomes seriously confusing and commonly offensive.
Dan teaches different ways to explain pain, like “Pain and a Sound System”, “The Pain Pie” and the “Pain Puzzle” that won’t anger, insult, or confuse patients. They introduce ways to approach various types of pain with thoughtful algorithms and thinking tools that cover both the more conservative management techniques Justine utilizes, through the more invasive diagnostics and interventions Dan specializes in, so you can more effectively sort through various pain drivers and buckets of sensitization while minimizing inadvertent harm along the way.
Hopefully, you build your insights and confidence in managing your patients’ pain and help us halve the pain of one billion people.
We both work with patients every day who have been told damaging things about pain, how it works, and why they feel the way they do…Who have been to many doctors and tried everything that was asked of them, yet weren’t empowered to change the things right at their fingertips or given the most appropriate treatments for their diagnosis. This frustrates both of us in different ways and has fueled our why’s in developing our own practices and perspectives on pain we want to share with you.
What chronic pain patients too often feel is hopelessness, desperation, shame, grief, and a lack of accountability from providers for providing better information and guidance.
We felt obligated to create this podcast to better bridge the gap between patients and providers, and change the way chronic pain is approached and treated. By breaking down the mechanisms of pain, various causes, contributing factors, amplifiers and more, we can link them to the best treatments or stratgies and how to most effectively implement them.
What most people miss is that pain education can be empowering for patients - but only if explained in a non-offensive way - so patients can make the connections without feeling so blamed for the state they are in that they lose the agency to create change. Blaming others for our health or lack of improvement takes our control away as patients. But how do navigate the medical system in a way we can also get the help we need?
At the heart of the communication/relationship challenges are guilt and blame. A lack of empathy on both sides that leads to no one being happy with the way things currently are.
From a blame perspective, doctors are expected to do too much and blamed when pain won’t go away. Patients are blamed and cast as resource wasting malingerers when pain isn’t because of something identifiable. And each party struggles with guilt and shame. The patient feels guilty for being sick, and the doctor feels shame for not knowing or being able to help. This is where for the physician, this disconnect too often leads to, it must be because of the patient, because that’s easier to say than ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’
This is not a recipe for healing. It leaves too many patients hopeless and helpless, and clinicians frustrated at the realistic therapeutic, diagnostic, and skill based limitations they come up against. How do we fix this? A few simple rules we challenge you with:
On the physician side:
It’s OK to not know, with caveats.
Don’t blame the patient.
Don’t use explanations that indirectly blame the patient.
On the patient side:
Work on the guilt of having the disease. It’s not your fault.
That being said, don’t blame others for the situation. You have to own it to change what you can.
The current environment we treat chronic pain in has made this very difficult. Different schools of thought and positions on the therapeutic spectrum are pitted against one another. The reality is we have to find ways around this. The way things currently are clearly is not working for most patients. It's Not in Your Head podcast is about educating patients and clinicians so we can truly improve outcomes on a large scale. THIS is how we create meaningful change, together.
At the heart of all change is purpose. Dan and Juz are on a mission to educate and empower more pain patients to take back control of their lives despite challenging diagnosis, create resources that support clinicians in diagnosis and treatment, and improve commujication and understanding between the two grounds.
Thank you for joining us in this mission.