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.
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