Pain is a Sound System.
With amplification, the speakers are turned up REALLYYYYY loud, and extremely loud input to the brain, makes it really hard for it to tell where it’s coming from, so you just get, it’s intense and everywhere. And because the brain is an organ, the symptoms are vague and limited.
Dan’s analogy is essentially a band set up for a show when it comes to how we experience the output of pain and symptoms:
The singer is your body parts
The set of microphone and leads are nerves
The amplifier is the spinal cord, brainstem, brain
The band is the context (imaging, other clinicians impact, and their own thoughts, beliefs and past experiences around pain) and others they love experiencing pain.
The audience is the patient. And honestly, it’s not just the patient alone.
As Dan says, “pain is a social disease”. Pain impacts not just the person suffering, but the people around them and the roles they’d otherwise occupy. Impacting people’s pain affects more than just them, and it’s one of the things that is so significant about improving pain and why we want to make larger changes by impacting them, their friends, their family, and the world around them.
Listen to the Pain is a Sound System episode to learn more about how this process going on affects more systems as things get amplified, going from following a specific pattern to having confusing features that become disproportionate, unpredictable, and widespread.
Pain fundamentally is a thief. It takes away the things you love. We have to move people from having pain stealing what they love, to taking back what’s theirs.