Feel Better Now: Neurosurgeon Reveals the New Science of Healing Your Body & Stopping Pain Today

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Chronic pain is common and isn't just an old person's problem.

  Neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says one in five to one in four people in the U.S., more than 50 million adults, live with chronic pain. It includes migraines and other headaches, facial pain such as trigeminal neuralgia and TMJ, joints from shoulders to ankles, and especially the back and neck.

• 02

  Acute pain is an alarm; chronic pain is the alarm that won't switch off.

  Touch a hot pan and you pull away: that's acute pain doing its job. Chronic pain persists after there's no ongoing injury. Gupta calls pain the most mysterious sensation humans have and says it must be treated that way.

• 03

  All pain is in the brain, and that doesn't mean it's imaginary.

  Gupta stresses this isn't minimizing: 'If your brain doesn't decide you have pain, then you don't have pain.' In a split second the brain weighs the signal against context: has this happened before, how much did it hurt last time, is there depression or anxiety? That's why the same injury can hurt very differently on a Tuesday versus another day, and why patients can suddenly cringe in his office when nothing has happened to them.

• 04

  Your body is one integrated system, so 'baggage' turns up the volume.

  Nociceptors (pain receptors), nerves, spinal cord and conscious processing are all connected. Stress, poor sleep, depression and anxiety (which he describes as 'baggage', not as a judgment) feed into how much it hurts. Gupta says the science is heading toward treating chronic pain holistically rather than just at the site.

• 05

  Neuroplasticity is neutral, so hyper-focus on pain can wire it in.

  He cites the 1940s idea from Donald Hebb: 'neurons that fire together wire together.' The brain will do whatever you train it to. If you're hyper-focused on pain, that circuit strengthens. There's growing evidence the brain can rewire pain circuitry and reduce its intensity or duration, even for old pain. Mel was struck that this means old injuries aren't necessarily permanent sentences.

• 06

  Opioids crowded out older, effective tools for 25 years.

  Kidney stones, dental work and hip fractures were all treated with opioids, so other methods got 'short shrift.' Gupta describes ERs now giving nerve blocks for hip fractures: about 10 minutes of numbing around the hip, pain scores dropping to zero and often no opioids needed afterward.

• 07

  Meditation measurably changes the brain and reduces pain.

  Gupta calls himself a former skeptic ('I'm the guy who opens the head'). He says meditation causes measurable thickening in brain areas that help reduce chronic pain. His advice is to look at the data, without overselling or underselling brain training.

• 08

  Old injuries can be prolonged by everything that piles on top.

  His friend Rich Roll, an ultra-endurance athlete, had front-and-back spine surgery and was shocked how long recovery took. Gupta says Roll's acute pain from 2012 had become wrapped in 13 years of accumulated baggage, which slowed healing.

• 09

  If a doctor says it's safe, movement is medicine.

  Unless the injury is acute or a licensed professional has identified a structural problem, Mel summarizes, 'your back is your back but the pain center is in your mind.' Being afraid to move can keep you stuck. Gupta adds that surgery is right in some cases, but probably not about 90% of the time for many problems, and he's a surgeon saying it.

• 10

  You are the most reliable narrator of your pain.

  Saying 'I'm in pain' to a doctor isn't enough. Get to know it: trace it, find hot spots, use as many adjectives as possible, even draw it. Track what makes it better or worse. Good pain doctors treat patients as active partners.