Research has been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. They found that 66% of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.
A growing number of scientists now believe that many cases of chronic back pain are caused primarily by brain changes. Pain can originate with an injury, but then the pain system can get “stuck” and keep firing long after injuries have healed.
Pain is the brain’s alarm system, letting us know about injuries or other threats to our body. Much of the time, the system works well, accurately warning us that a part of our body is injured and needs to be protected. But when a person has been in pain for months, years or even decades, pain processing pathways are more likely to fire, and brain regions that typically are not involved in pain start to be involved. Chronic pain also leads to increased levels of activity in glial cells, which are part of the brain’s immune system. All these changes in the brain then serve to “entrench” the pain, making it persist.
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