If what we claim here is true (and specifically if the 2022 Ashar et al. Pain Reprocessing Therapy paper does replicate[1]), the implications feel pretty enormous. It suggests that a large fraction of the 800 million-1 billion who report chronic pain could experience permanent relief from <8 hours with a practitioner.
After my own experience, I pivoted from ML into pain research (building computational models). I went through the Pain Reprocessing Therapy training and have since been iterating on it (have so far successfully brought ~20 people to resolution, I’d say at a roughly similar rate that the 2022 Ashar et al. paper reports).
My experience is that there are different populations who respond quite differently to each intervention. Some people just need Sarno’s book and feel immediate relief. Others are too dissociated to even do somatic tracking and need some assistance to work up to that.
Some other resources I might add for those interested:
I’ve been in contact with both Yoni Ashar at CU Anschutz and also Mike Donnino at Harvard; they’re both running larger trials which I’m told is going quite well — though they are often bottlenecked in finding participants.
so, like, while I’m still ambivalent-lean-no about sharing even mild insightful things in today’s world, since people have been pushing me to consider sharing things that just make people better off, I’ll at least say that I’ve had results where explaining brains properly to claude works pretty well. it takes some doing though and you need to explain some things that are so obvious as to not need mention, for human practitioners
I suppose an 80⁄20 version would be to just load some books and resources into an LLM’s context and tell it to be a good therapist who implements this stuff. I haven’t tried this myself though, and without the context I think Claude got some things wrong when it tried to recommend me exercises to do.
ehh, I put reasonably high probability that my paranoia about sharing things is just silly for most things besides specific veins of research I’m not even doing, and that I’ll end up sharing this thing? or maybe someone will figure it out reasonably quickly. ask me in like two weeks if I haven’t posted by then
Thank you for writing this!
I’m the one who wrote about my own similar realization, with How predictive processing solved my wrist pain.
If what we claim here is true (and specifically if the 2022 Ashar et al. Pain Reprocessing Therapy paper does replicate[1]), the implications feel pretty enormous. It suggests that a large fraction of the 800 million-1 billion who report chronic pain could experience permanent relief from <8 hours with a practitioner.
After my own experience, I pivoted from ML into pain research (building computational models). I went through the Pain Reprocessing Therapy training and have since been iterating on it (have so far successfully brought ~20 people to resolution, I’d say at a roughly similar rate that the 2022 Ashar et al. paper reports).
My experience is that there are different populations who respond quite differently to each intervention. Some people just need Sarno’s book and feel immediate relief. Others are too dissociated to even do somatic tracking and need some assistance to work up to that.
Some other resources I might add for those interested:
This evidence page points to some other papers and success stories
The TMS wiki database of success stories was quite motivating for me to see how people with much worse conditions recovered
Here I evaluate Sarno’s ischemia theory of chronic pain in light of more contemporary literature
I’ve been in contact with both Yoni Ashar at CU Anschutz and also Mike Donnino at Harvard; they’re both running larger trials which I’m told is going quite well — though they are often bottlenecked in finding participants.
Do you think with the right prompt, current LLMs could do what practitioners do?
so, like, while I’m still ambivalent-lean-no about sharing even mild insightful things in today’s world, since people have been pushing me to consider sharing things that just make people better off, I’ll at least say that I’ve had results where explaining brains properly to claude works pretty well. it takes some doing though and you need to explain some things that are so obvious as to not need mention, for human practitioners
Do you want to make Claude make an app that would do the thing? Might be pretty valuable if it works.
I suppose an 80⁄20 version would be to just load some books and resources into an LLM’s context and tell it to be a good therapist who implements this stuff. I haven’t tried this myself though, and without the context I think Claude got some things wrong when it tried to recommend me exercises to do.
ehh, I put reasonably high probability that my paranoia about sharing things is just silly for most things besides specific veins of research I’m not even doing, and that I’ll end up sharing this thing? or maybe someone will figure it out reasonably quickly. ask me in like two weeks if I haven’t posted by then
What does this mean?
Probably not for most people. I’ve found there’s something importantly load bearing about the presence of another person that is hard to articulate
I agree, this was a much needed post. I appreciated seeing this in my email inbox.