Become a CEO to Reduce Your Risk of Anxiety & Symptoms
Those who follow me know I am big fan of the science supporting the work I do to help people heal from chronic health conditions. I love it when the title of a complex brain study says exactly what we…
Repressed Emotions & Physical Symptoms
Here is an article describing how repressed emotions can affect us and also cause physical somatic symptoms. It's something I see in my practice and something many of you will relate to as well. What happens…
Self-Efficacy is Important for Healing Chronic Symptoms
One thing that's not talked about much in the chronic pain world is what's called self-efficacy. Self efficacy (SE) is defined in this review study as "the personal confidence to carry out an activity…
20 year study shows how anger can cause health symptoms
In this study the authors were looking at whether chronic anger expression or what's called stonewalling predicted cardiovascular or musculoskeletal complaints in married couples over a period…
Anxiety the cause of many physical symptoms
Anxiety is probably the biggest thing I see in my practice that causes physical somatic symptoms in the body that are not originating from a physical structural cause. The symptom list is vast, check out…
Chronic pain is a memory of the pain in the brain
Researchers at Northwestern University have been studying the brain-chronic pain connection for well over a decade. Based on their multiple studies "we argue that the state of the brain’s emotional and…
Altered Brain Connections in Chronic Back Pain
I've posted before about how we see stronger one-way brain signals from the amygdala to the pre-frontal cortex in anxiety and how this is one-way signaling can cause the amygdala to hijack someone into…
Scaling Up Cortical Control Inhibits Pain
What this fMRI brain study and many others are showing is a loss of whats called cortical control over the pain system. This is where the prefrontal cortex loses its power (strength) and firing rates with…
The Nocebo Effect Produces Physical Symptoms
This 2020 study in the New England Journal of Medicine from Harvard Medical School looked at people taking statin medications for high cholesterol. It really highlights the power of the brain in producing…
Central Sensitization in many chronic pain conditions
Central sensitization is something I see in a lot of people with chronic health ailments and something we need to address for healing. According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)…
