The Science of Pain: Myths, Truths, and Understanding | Dr. Rachel Zoffness

Rachel Zoffness (0:00)

And the problem that I see with pain, and the way we talk about pain is, either your pain is physical and you see a physician, or your pain is emotional and you see a therapist.

But what neuroscience tells us is that that's never how pain works. It's never either physical or emotional. It's always both.

Michael Gervais (0:24)

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Okay, this week's conversation is with Dr. Rachel Zoffness. She's a medical educator and disruptor who is revolutionizing the way that we understand and treat pain. By trade, Rachel is a trained pain psychologist. She's a visiting professor at Stanford, an assistant clinical professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, and a consultant on the development of integrative pain programs around the world. She's also the author of the Pain Management Workbook, which merges pain neuroscience with psychology, brain and body, physical and emotional work, to get to the heart of true pain management. If someone close to you lives with any kind of pain or chronic discomfort, which I'm guessing is true for many of us, I think you're going to find this conversation with Rachel incredibly valuable.

We talk about frameworks. We talk about ways to think about how pain works. All of that is meaningful as part of the healing process. All of us experience pain at some point in our lives. It is part of the human condition. And knowing how pain works and where it comes from and typical responses to it, that's all part of the management system. And so thanks to Rachel, she decodes how that works, and it no longer needs to be a mystery.