During Pain Awareness Month this September, Dr. Eric Anderson, Neurologist and Chief Medical Officer of Lin Health, the virtual health care company based in Denver, CO, is emphasizing that the nervous system plays a much bigger role in chronic pain than many people realize. According to Dr. Anderson, "Pain is always produced by the brain and the nervous system. When someone hears 'it's in your brain,' they often hear 'it's imaginary.' But it's quite the opposite. Your pain is very very real. It's generated by real circuits in a real nervous system." He explains that in chronic pain, the nervous system can become oversensitive through a process called central sensitization, where even a light touch can trigger a pain response. This understanding, he says, opens up new ways of treating pain beyond simply treating the part of the body that hurts. "The nervous system is plastic, meaning that what it may have learned, it can unlearn. And I think that that is the most encouraging news in pain medicine right now."
Lin Health's brain-based approach is rooted in modern clinical understanding and evidence-based behavioral therapies. The program is delivered virtually, matching each patient with a trained pain-recovery coach following a medical review. Patients receive a personalized pain-recovery plan that incorporates evidence-based therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), among other approaches. These therapies are designed to help patients understand how pain is processed, reduce fear and reactivity around symptoms, and develop new ways of responding to pain. Patients work with their coach through weekly live sessions and in-app messaging while having access to daily exercises and other resources through the Lin Health app, which patients can download at the Google Play Store for Android devices or the Apple App Store for iPhones.
The results are notable: Lin Health reports that 92% of patients experience significant improvement in pain and level of function, pain intensity is reduced by 45%, and 59% of patients with medium-to-high pain reduce their pain to low or no pain after six months. The company currently earns a 4.8 rating on TrustPilot.com. For people living with persistent pain, understanding the distinction between where pain is felt and how it is processed could open the door to substantially more effective ways of approaching treatment. As Dr. Anderson and Lin Health bring greater attention to the nervous system's role in chronic pain, this approach may offer new hope for the millions who suffer from chronic pain and the clinicians who treat them.
