Most people with chronic back pain naturally think their pain is caused by injuries or other problems in the body, such as arthritis or bulging disks. But our research team has found that thinking about the root cause of pain as a process that’s occurring in the brain can help promote recovery. That’s a key finding of a study my colleagues and I recently published in JAMA Network Open, a monthly open-access medical journal.
We’ve been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. To do this, we carried out a study in which some people were randomly chosen to receive the pain reprocessing therapy treatment, while others were given a placebo injection into their backs.
We included 151 adults aged 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66 percent of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20 percent of people who received a placebo.