KevinMD December 30, 2025
Most people assume that pain and illness are caused only by injury or disease. If your back hurts, it must be damaged; abdominal pain must come only from inflammation, infection, or tumor. Most physicians learn this in medical school, as I did. But treatment based on this assumption often fails to provide relief for persistent pain, leaving millions of patients and countless well-intentioned physicians frustrated and in despair. The result is that an astounding 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain.
The reason is that real pain anywhere in the body can be generated by the brain, even when nothing physical is wrong. Pain experts believe that emotional stress, when not fully processed, fires up the nervous system, which responds...
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