I'm thrilled to announce I've been working on an exciting new PBS special that will go on the air November 27th. If your local PBS station hasn't already scheduled it, please request that they do. It's a really good show featuring knowledgeable and articulate pain experts and patients who are relieving chronic pain by focusing on where it lives -- in the brain!
Even though the pain is rooted in brain patterns, you of course feel the pain in your body! The discovery of the brain's role in maintaining and relieving chronic pain does not mean that you are making it up, or that you are simply imagining it.
The pain is real, but we now know much more about how to relieve it from the inside out as well as the outside in.
Brain/body treatment of pain is safe, effective, non-addicting and compatible with each and every other pain treatment you have found helpful.
This is an incredibly important time to educate people about non-pharmacological approaches to chronic pain because in just the last 12 months, over 100,000 Americans have died from opiate drug overdoses, often having started from trying to relieve pain.
The show features variety of interesting mind/brain/body approaches from guided imagery, mindfulness, hypnosis and biofeedback, to acupuncture, to a novel device called a Scrambler that sends new code via electrical stimulation to break up the closed loops of nerve cell pathways that underlie chronic pain.
The premium reward package sent in appreciation for a contribution to PBS includes the DVD of the show, with extra outtakes, a new book called Pain Brain, and an instructional manual that will show you how to use a low power laser pointer to stimulate acupuncture points on yourself for pain relief. I'm happy to say I authored both books!
Those of you who have already taken my online course Use Your Brain to Ease Your Pain will have some of the gifts included in the package, but you may want the additional encouragement of the experts in the new show, the new book, and the laser acupuncture manual to add to your self-help toolkit. You'll certainly want to watch the show in any case.
Pain Brain in the Media
Interestingly, and having nothing transactionally associated with our new show, there are several recent media features that address the critical necessity of what we are teaching in this new show. The New York Times recently featured a series of articles called Pain Brain.
"Dopesick" starring Michael Keaton is a chilling dramatization of the selling of billions of dollars of Oxycontin to American doctors and patients by Purdue Pharmaceuticals by claiming that it was a "non-addicting opiate." It's based on the book of the same name by Beth Macy.
Synchronistically, season 4 of Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton, is also focused on the same theme.
Both shows are well done and educational about the seamier side of selling pharmaceuticals into the medical marketplace.