“We want to halve the pain of a million 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 1 million people, we not only change a million 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.
The cure for blame is responsibility and improved empathy and communication.
INiYH Podcast is about taking ownership over your experience and empowering patients to control everything they can, while helping clinicians better treat 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
As patients, we are tired of making decisions we regret, not knowing better, not asking the right questions, and thinking about pain in a way that just perpetuates hopelessness. And we are tired of being told different variations of ‘it’s in your head’ that completely diminish our very real symptoms.
Once you “get” how pain works, the concept of radical responsibility becomes powerful, empowering you to take back power rather, and better outsource the pieces that need addressing. Also shifting the locus of control back to what we as patients impact, rather than primarily searching outside ourselves for solutions, gives patients the best outcomes long-term.
Justine’s signature MARSMethod embraces techniques to turn the volume on your pain system down through unique movement strataegies, mindfulness, sleep, energy and stress management, pacing and nutrition habits, so you develop the tools and mindset necessary to attack the pieces of pain you control. Her methods to conservatively manage pain and take your power back as patients, born out of her own experience with pain, are critical to more effectively treat escalating sensitization and rely less on medications and interventions.
How? Justine and Dan will break down how central sensitization really presents, and take you through first through fourth line treatments, adding in the best and latest in medication and interventional management, so you can build your Pain Puzzle and hopefully halve your pain.
“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 and Justine will go through 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 will look at ways to approach different types of pain, tease apart Justines’ MARSmethod when it comes to dealing more effectively with the increasing amplification of vague yet persistent, disproportionate symptoms, and keep you up to date with the latest in pain intervention and science from the world’s best.
Hopefully, you build your insights and confidence in managing your patients’ pain and help us Halve the Pain of 1 million 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 every other doctor and tried everything that was asked of them, yet they 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, causes, contributing factors, amplifiers and more, we can link them to the best treatments based upon diagnosis and how you most effectively implement them, addressing explain central sensitization in an actionable way you can actually do something about.
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’re in you loose the chance to help them. Blaming others for our health or lack of improvement takes our control away as patients. But how do we do better and get over some of the resentment we’ve rightfully accumulated?
At the heart of the challenge are guilt and blame. A lack of empathy on both sides that leads to no one being happy with the current way things 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. The patient feels guilty for being sick, and the doctor feels guilty for not knowing or not being able to help. This is where for the Dr, this disconnect too often leads to, it must be because of the patient. Because that’s easier to say than ‘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 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. The reality is we have to find ways around this. The way we’re trying clearly is not working for most patients. And we think we can do much better. It's Not in Your Head podcast and The Empower You Foundation are not just about educating patients, but practitioners too, 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 I are on a mission to educate and empower more pain patients to take back control of their lives despite complex, challenging diagnosis.
And we can’t wait for you to join us.