From Lab to Life: Unlearning Chronic Pain

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Chronic pain affects one adult in five (20%) worldwide, or over 1.5 billion people, and is the leading cause of disability. It is defined as pain that lasts or recurs for longer than three months, often persisting beyond the expected time of healing.   When doctors treat it with medication – pain-killers – there is at times a tragic outcome, when patients become addicted. I suspect many Times of Israel readers suffer from chronic pain.

An article in University of California at San Francisco Magazine, Summer 2025 sheds new light and new hope: “Can We Train Our Brain to Unlearn Chronic Pain?” By Jaimie Seaton.

The bottom line: The brain ‘learns’ to feel chronic pain. What is learned, can be unlearned. Without painkillers.

“A breakthrough came in 2023, when Dr. Prasad Shirvalkar’s research team implanted electrodes in the brains of four patients who then tracked their pain at home. Patients reported the level and location of their pain and their other symptoms multiple times a day, while also capturing 30-second snapshots of their brain activity with the press of a button on a remote provided by the study.

“Using this data and machine learning, the team was able to predict, based solely on brain signals, when each patient would experience a high or low pain state. Notably, they were predicting real-world chronic pain. They also discovered that the signals for acute pain and severe chronic pain are distinct – not just a more enduring version of the same thing, Shirvalkar says.

In short, suppose you have a continuing sharp pain in your back, especially when standing. Your brain ‘learns’ that when you stand for long periods, there is pain. So …it signals you ‘ouch…pain!’ when you stand. It has learned to do so. And the source of this ‘pain signal’ from the brain is different from the source of pain when, say, you stub your toe. The pain is real. But it is different from other forms of acute pain.

Doctors and psychologists have developed ways to treat chronic pain, unconventional ways, without drugs. Sometimes it includes DBS – deep brain stimulation. There have been astonishing favorable results. Simply – what is learned…e.g. pain … can be unlearned.

Part of the problem is that doctors are trained to find the sources of pain in bodily tissue. When they fail to find the source, they treat the symptom, with pain medicine. The market value of pain medicines globally is $85 billion, slated to grow to $125 billion within a decade.

But what if the source is in the brain itself?

“It’s all in your head” is true – but not a message of hope to patients. Better: “Your pain is learned, let’s together find ways to unlearn it.”

If you suffer from chronic pain, I suggest trying to find an expert who is familiar with this line of research and who has had demonstrated success in using it to successfully treat suffers of chronic pain.

Do not regard your chronic pain as a life sentence. It isn’t. You can be paroled. Lots of cases prove it.