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Comment by nchi3 | Hacker News Reader

You might have heard about this or tried it, but if not: There's some very promising studies from last year regarding treatment of CLBP that doesn't seem to have a physiological cause[1]. This type of "treatment" helped me turn around my backpain (both upper and lower) which had been getting worse and worse over ~6 months (not very long, I know), and after a few months I was virtually pain free.

This type of therapy is not new, but it's only very recently that proper big and reputable studies have been done. Most people don't even need to see a professional, reading online and doing it on your own is enough for the majority (including me).

[1]: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/09/29/how-therapy-not-pi...

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This is an interesting article. I would like to hear more information about how the therapy is actually done. This reminds me of techniques like Edmund Jacobson's "Progressive Relaxation". I'm also reading a book called, "A Headache in the Pelvis", which claims that essential to healing is this idea that we must learn to properly relax and accept the pain we feel. I've found it hard to collect actual instruction about how to do this though.

Yeah I'm very curious to know how this Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) from the article is done.

I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I'd say from my personal experience a physical yoga practice helps teach you to properly relax into what can sometimes be extreme discomfort. I remember when I first started practicing, whenever we'd get to long holds of poses (e.g. splits, pigeon, ustrasana), my body would start panicking and want me to come out of it immediately. But if you just keep bringing your awareness to the breath and meditate through the sensations that arise, the body starts relaxing and accepts where it's at.

I can imagine the PRT therapy probably includes some subset of the four foundations of mindfulness [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satipatthana

See my reply to denvaar for an example!

It has much in common with mindfulness I'd say, with some extra "simplified" techniques and learnings. It's easy to dismiss this type of therapy (even more so before there were studies on it), but the mindset changes which it advocates are very wholesome and are likely to increase quality of life even if it would fail to lessen the pain, so there's very little to lose!

Sounds quite similar! Alan Gordon (who treated the patients in the study) has a free program online[1] which goes through the ideas behind PRT (though it doesn't call it PRT in there, I think that term is much more recent).

[1]: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/painrecovery/

Have there been any studies comparing the brains of people who derive pleasure from pain vs people who don’t? I wonder if this could be related? Some people seem to have “trained” their brains not to recognize pain signals as unpleasant. Or (because I imagine they still feel pain) maybe they can even decide when and which pain signals are pleasant vs unpleasant? I wonder if people who enjoy BDSM are any more or less likely to suffer from chronic pain than the rest of the population.

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