The Psychology of Pain | Dr Tom Walters

Tom Walters (0:00)

For hundreds of years, pain was believed to be this sensory phenomena that came from your tissues of your body. That really has changed through this research. A lot of it was on phantom limb pain, on people who had lost a part of their limb but still had pain. That piece of the body is not there anymore, so you can't think of it as just coming straight from those tissues.

Michael Gervais (0:16)

They could not have a signal from the hand that didn't exist.

Tom Walters (0:20)

Exactly. And so that research really drove a lot of the changes of thinking about pain as sort of more of a top-down and output of the brain.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Award-certified orthopedic physical therapist and strength and conditioning specialist, Dr. Tom Walters.

Michael Gervais (0:33)

He's also the author of Rehab Science, How to Overcome Pain and Heal from Injury.

SPEAKER_4 (0:38)

And has spent almost two decades teaching people about human movement, pain science, and how to effectively recover from injury.

Tom Walters (0:44)

They took people and they touched the back of their hand with a metal rod. The metal rod is the same temperature all the time, but they adjusted the meaning associated with it. So in some people, they would show a blue light, and some people, they would show a red light before touching their hands. And of course, when people saw a red light, they would say more pain. The brain is perceiving it as even more danger.

Michael Gervais (1:03)

Why is that important for you?

Tom Walters (1:04)

For a lot of people in my world, it's actually that they go in and see a health care provider who tells them, oh, you've got severely degenerated discs, you've got the spine of a 70-year-old, or you've got this meniscus tear. We have lots of research showing that that creates a lot of fear and anxiety and actually worsens outcomes in rehab and in physical therapy.

Michael Gervais (1:23)

How do you help people work with that fear?

Tom Walters (1:25)

I would say the biggest thing is.

Michael Gervais (1:34)

Tom, I think about your expertise a lot, and the power of the mind-brain interface, and the way that we organize ourselves, our psychological experience and our physical experience in life, through our bodies and through our minds. I'm excited to have this conversation with you because you've been studying the body and pain and injury and optimization for a long time. So thank you for spending the time in this conversation.

Tom Walters (2:01)

Well, thanks for having me. I have me here. I've listened to your podcast quite a bit over the years. I just honestly really appreciate the authenticity and kind of the deepness that you bring to really connecting with people. And I think you and I were talking before we got on here. Just your background as a sports psychologist and working with athletes, it's so complimentary to what I do. And we were just saying that, I mean, I could imagine if patients came in to have the two of us together in a room with them, like you just said, to cover the mind, body and the physical side. I mean, it is like the dynamic duo. So thanks for having me.

Michael Gervais (2:34)

I'm stoked to do this with you. What do you hope that people will take from this conversation?

Tom Walters (2:38)

I think the biggest thing for me is that people come away from a conversation like this, understanding pain and injury, how they're similar, how they're different. And then there's so much fear and anxiety and worry that goes around pain, understandably, and injury. And I think some of that can be mitigated when you understand pain and injury a little bit better. I know for me, I always feel really grateful that as a physical therapist, if something happens that causes pain or an injury, I don't get as worried about it because I can kind of think, oh, anatomically or this region of my body or this is where it's at, this is what I was doing. I can have a pretty good hypothesis to what's going on. And I think listening to a podcast discussion like this, even just in an hour, you can kind of learn what are the different types of pain, what are the different types of injuries, and that really helps people, anything in life. If you don't understand it, it creates more fear and worry. And I think when you just have a little bit of some of those base level ideas of, again, what are the different types of pain, what are the different types of injuries, it helps you go down, you can kind of go down a particular path and you can kind of have a jumpstart on how do I manage this.