Summary:

Did You Know:

• Movement Toward Health is a training program that teaches you skills for transforming your health, reducing pain, improving mood and energy. It opens periodically for new members. You can get more information and join the waitlist here: www.MTHTribe.com. 
• Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness.  Learn more here https://www.drshiller.com/consult
• Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. Learn practical tools for transforming suffering, reducing stress and inflammation.  You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com

Related Posts:

• How to unlearn the mind-body patterns that create chronic pain and illness.
• Why Does Chronic Pain Happen? Empower Your Healing.
• Life-changing stuff most doctors don’t tell you about fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and chronic illness.
• LDN can be great.  But here’s why it is not a miracle cure for pain, fatigue, and fibromyalgia.

Full Transcript:

Hey, it’s Dr. Shiller we’re talking today about the six things that can worsen pain and lead to disability and um, and slow the healing and recovery process. And it’s really important to check this out cuz this is not typical stuff you’re going to hear from conventional medicine. It’s not typically treatable with drugs and procedures, but it is treatable and fixable and healable through things that you can learn to do for yourself.

So these are game changing principles that have completely shifted things for so many of the people who have come to me with the, with that situation of I’m still suffering and I tried everything. Well, like, no, you didn’t try every, everything. These are things you didn’t try. Let’s do that. And in many, many, many cases, profound difference.

So let’s open this up. Let’s talk about it. . And so I first want to talk about, well, how does that process happen? What worsens it? Why is it that things tend to snowball after injury or illness and get worse and worse? And that leads to the clarity about like, okay, so what do we do about this to help you get better?

And so a little background of what I bring to this conversation. I trained in physical medicine, which is also called physiatry, pain management, internal medicine at some of the top places in the United States, and have worked in integrative rehabilitation medicine and pain management for over 20 years.

And so I’ve seen literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who’ve had persistent challenging problems. alongside with my formal training, I did decades of training and clinical practice and teaching in what you might call complimentary or natural healing. So I developed this broader perspective than what they taught me at at Duke University in Harvard Medical School, and that’s, let me see, the things that conventional medicine over often overlooks.

which are really important to the recovery process and in my experience, that has been what has enabled me to frequently help people who are kind of stuck in that I’ve tried everything and I can’t get better place. And so my experience is mirrored in that of many of my colleagues who I’ve spoken with and who I’ve trained with, where when we bring these new perspectives, then there’s frequently dramatic results.

Frequently the patients who are stuck and not getting better are suddenly getting a whole lot better in feeling better. So it’s extraordinarily like a privilege and gratifying to be like, wow, this is actually. and helping means that person who was stuck in suffering with pain, inability to do stuff, brain fog, various kinds of symptoms, is now feeling better and able to function better.

And I want to be clear that this is not alternative, and this is not antagonistic to conventional medicine. It’s broadening the model. It’s understanding things more fundamentally, more systemically, more holistically, but not in the flaky. Like a grounded scientific way of understanding, well, what is your biology?

What is your mind body system? How does it function? How does it get out of function? So we’re gonna share six things that. Worsen pain and disability and prevent and block the healing process. We’re gonna share an overview of that and then in other videos I’m gonna drill down into those so you can get the detail and understand them more comprehensively.

But I really want you to have the big picture. This is probably gonna be two videos so that it’s more easily digestible. And so I really want you to plug into this whole learning series if this is a topic that seems important to you. So I want to tell you how to get access to it because I’ve set up a program that’s called Movement Towards Health, and it’s really about a training program.

It gives you skills for transforming the biology of pain and suffering and disability to the biology and the psychology of wellbeing and recovery. Um, and. , there’s a wait list for that program. It opens up periodically. My suggestion is get on that wait list because what will happen is you’ll get notifications about as these videos come out, so you can watch them.

There’s also a place in there where you can binge watch them all at once, once they’re all in place. Um, and you’ll also get notification about the program and more information about it. You might find it interesting and you might want to join. If you don’t, it’s fine. Just enjoy and learn and be inspired.

to understand what it is that is perpetuating, creating the suffering that you’re having so that you can make conscious choices about what to do about it. Because most doctors are not gonna do that because they’re not aware about it. And of course, it doesn’t mean that they’re bad people or bad doctors.

It just means that the conventional medical model sees things a certain way and there’s a broader way of seeing things. and what I’m doing is sharing that broader way so that you can make conscious choices and do the stuff that you need to do so that you can feel better and live better. Okay, so we’re jumping in.

Problem one that worsens pain and illness and prevents healing is what we call autonomic imbalance. Okay? That’s a big scary word, but really what it means is like this, you probably know that you have a stressed. And a relaxation response. It’s built into your entire brain, spinal cord, and your whole nervous system.

It touches every cell in your body. One aspect of it is fight, flight, freeze. That’s your stress response, and the other is your. Rest, digest, and heal or relaxation response. And they’re meant to be in balance with each other. But what happens is that chronic pain, chronic illness shift the, the scale towards an overactivity of that stress fight, flight, freeze response, and a bunch of other things can shift the scale towards that, which feeds into chronic pain and chronic illness, and the underlying biology that drives chronic pain and chronic illness.

So it could be. The trauma, the injury, the illness. It could be earlier things that happened, your life that were traumatic. It could be stress, it could be lack of sleep. It could be chemical exposure or toxic exposure. It could be early life stress or adverse events, which are more and more proven to be associated with chronic pain and honest chronic illness.

And the issue is autonomic imbalance, where the system is shifted to an overactive fight flight, freeze. There are simple things that you can learn to do to bring balance to that fight, flight, freeze response. Some of them are things that you can learn on your own for free, and they are life changing for many people and they’re also life skills, and they empower you to deal with the difficulty in life no matter what it is.

So there are things you can learn on your own. There’s things you can learn together one-on-one with a therapist or in groups or various contexts that support you to retrain your system from being in this fight, flight, freeze response to being in a more relaxed, anti-inflammatory, healing oriented response.

And that’s also part of what we do in movement towards health. So moving on to number two is mood instability or mood imbalance. And the most common things you might think about are like depression and anxiety. There’s other things that go along with its symptoms of O C D. It’s a complex picture. The thing I want you to understand is that the biology of.

Depression and anxiety isn’t what we’ve always thought, which is, oh well, it’s about serotonin problems. Well, yeah, there can be issues with neurotransmitters and, and that’s how some of the pharmaceutical companies have made tons and tons of money, and they push that point of view because that’s how they make their money.

But there’s an aspect of it that has to do with inflammation. There’s an aspect of it has to do with. Your balance of your stress and react and, and relaxation response, that autonomic balance and it’s lifestyle. These are conditions that are affecting your thoughts, your emotions, and your core bodily functions.

Your brain, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, your physical activity, your thoughts. All this stuff is deeply integrated and those things that you can do on those three levels of thought. Reframing and and mindset training of training your mind with various tools to shift your biology, of diet, of nutrients, of physical activity, lifestyle, stuff that can have a huge impact.

And the reason this is so important is because we know that depression and anxiety are part of what’s in that vicious cycle with chronic pain, with disability, with the disability cycle. And so we’ll talk more about that in a bit, but you really gotta get the mood stuff under. Number three is your overall biochemical, metabolic state of your body.

And so check out this slide, which shows some of these relationships, but like I mentioned, your. Brain and brain chemistry and your autonomic system function, your thoughts and your emotions, your gastrointestinal functions. So the biome, the barrier function of the gut, the immune system, the hormonal system of the body.

Um, these are profoundly integrated and they have a huge impact on how your body function. They have a huge impact on how you think, how you feel, how much energy you have, how much strength you have. They have an impact on sensitization of your pain pathways. So this is complex biochemistry and anatomy and metabolic stuff, and there’s things again that you can do.

That’s the big part of the gift of the functional medicine model, is how to look at all that in a scientifically based way where we can think ration. about how to address these different aspects of dysfunction, like it shows in the slide and, and that involves, again, lifestyle stuff. It’s diet and it’s nutrients, it’s mind body therapies, it’s physical exercise, physical treatments.

And these things have made a profound impact for so many of my patients who are dealing with these difficult pain and related syndromes. So the point of all of this is to sensitize. that there are these dysfunctions that can be part of what’s perpetuating the challenges you’re having, and these are things that are within your control to work on.

They’re things that typically aren’t fixed by drugs, although sometimes medications can support the process. They’re things that are fixed and changed by the things you do for yourself sometimes in conjunction or in cooperation with appropriate care caregivers or therapists or practitioners. Okay, so that’s an overview of the first.

Of the six things that can worsen pain and disability and prevent recovery. And and that’s especially true if you’ve sort of done all the right conventional things and you’ve tried everything and you haven’t gotten better, you need to [00:11:00] think about these things. And so in summary, these are dysfunctions.

These are shifts in the functioning of your whole mind body unified system. And they’re not really taught in medical school, though they are supported by medical research. I suspect that in 20 or 30 years, they will be much more widely taught in medical school. Um, but there are, there is hope and there’s help.

There’s things you can learn to do. There’s practitioners who can help you, and the first step is understanding them so you can start to actually address. , in my experience and in the experience of many, many practitioners with whom I’ve worked or trained or, or, or taught, um, that the effects can be dramatic when you actually start to shift the underlying biology that makes these things worse.

We covered three of the six thing, these six things. Um, the second video will show you the rest of those. Look for the link below this video to get to that video, which is the se, the, the second set of three. Um, I want to share that [00:12:00] movement towards Health is a training program to give you skills to address these underlying issues.

And I encourage you to get on the waiting list. Movement towards Health opens periodically, and if you’re on the waiting list, you’ll hear about it, you’ll get an email and you won’t miss out. Um, and you’ll also get access to the additional training sessions that go into more depth into these aspects that go into more depth on the six things that can prevent the healing process from happening.

And I just wanna stress that. , this is about empowering you. You’ve got the capacity to learn things that shift your biology, and when you learn those, you actually are acquiring life skills. It’s about building your resilience, helping you have skills to live more effectively despite all the difficult things that are going on in life.

And we have a lot of different thing, difficult things going on in life in our generation. Okay, so obviously this is an overview video. I encourage you to go to mth tribe.com, get on that wailing list, dive deeper [00:13:00] into the materials, see how it impacts you, what you learn from it. So thanks for watching this.

Um, if you like this, I encourage you, first of all to leave a comment or shoot me an email. With one thing you learned about it, and also share the video wherever you’re finding it. Share it with people you care about, who you think might benefit from starting the OR, or deepening this learning process about this journey of self-healing.

So thanks again. Take care.