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Chronic Pain Isn’t Always Structural: How To Retrain Your Nervous System

Discover why chronic pain is often driven by an overactive nervous system and persistent fight-or-flight physiology rather than ongoing structural damage.
Understand how chronic stress, repetitive thought patterns, and emotional threat responses can amplify both physical and mental pain.
Learn practical strategies—including nervous system regulation, expressive writing, breathwork, sleep, and active awareness—to help restore safety and promote healing.

About the Expert

Julia Ward, MD

Dr. Julia Ward

Dr. Julia Ward is a compassionate and forward-thinking physician with over a decade of experience in functional medicine, known for her systems-based approach to healing chronic illness. She is the founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine, where she helps patients uncover the deeper drivers of disease and restore health by addressing the body as an interconnected whole.
After earning her medical degree from the University of Southern California, Dr. Ward served in the U.S. Navy, practicing general, urgent, and emergency medicine both domestically and abroad. Her own personal struggle with unexplained fatigue led her to question the limitations of conventional medicine and ultimately guided her toward functional medicine.
While she initially focused on identifying root causes, Dr. Ward’s approach has continued to evolve. She now emphasizes the importance of how and when the body is treated—not just what is treated. Through her Balanced Body System Reset™ framework, she focuses on restoring nervous system balance, improving mitochondrial function, reducing inflammation, and addressing root causes in the right sequence to create lasting and meaningful healing.
Dr. Ward integrates advanced diagnostics, personalized care plans, and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen and ozone therapy, while also emphasizing foundational elements like nervous system regulation, lifestyle, and patient engagement. She believes that healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, but a guided journey that requires both strategy and active participation.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Ward continues to expand her expertise in areas such as precision genomics, brain health, and complex chronic illness. She is deeply committed to helping her patients not only feel better, but truly understand their bodies and take ownership of their health.
A devoted wife and mother of five, Dr. Ward brings both clinical expertise and personal insight to her work, with a mission to transform the way chronic illness is understood and treated.

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Guest

David Hanscom

David Hanscom

Dr. David Hanscom is a former complex orthopedic spine surgeon, bestselling author, and internationally recognized expert in chronic pain recovery and mind-body medicine. After spending more than 30 years performing complex spine surgeries—and overcoming his own 15-year struggle with chronic pain, anxiety, and depression—he shifted his focus from structural interventions to nervous system healing. Creator of The DOC (Direct Your Own Care) Journey and author of Back in Control and Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind, Dr. Hanscom now teaches people around the world how to resolve chronic pain by reducing threat physiology, improving neuroplasticity, and restoring the body's natural capacity to heal.

More from David Hanscom on DrTalks

In other words, if a person walks in the room that's dangerous, your body's already gone into fight or flight, and then your thoughts come one to 10 seconds later.

So it's physiology first. We have all sorts of stresses coming at us with all this sensory input, so we're already in fight of flight. Then the thoughts interpret the negativity, we don't like the thought, as we start fighting the thoughs, which gives them power.

The thoughts themselves become a threat, And the problem with the human brain is that it cannot differentiate mental threats versus physical threats. So we're in barter with unwanted thoughts that the brain cannot to differentiate between thoughts and physical threat.

We're really in a sustained fight or flight. Like we said before, every organ system is affected. Every cell in the body is infected. There's about 30 trillion cells in body as you well know.

Every cell responds in its own unique way, depending on whether it's kidney, heart, lung, whatever. So that's why there's so many symptoms, because so may organ systems are affected.

Welcome to the Functional Edge. I'm Dr. Julia Ward and this is where science meets real world strategies for living healthier, sharper, and stronger. From uncovering hidden environmental toxins to unlocking peak performance and mental clarity, we cover it all.

Ready to take control of your health and thrive? Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to The Funotional Edge podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Julia Ward, medical director and founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine.

Today we're honored to welcome Dr David Hanscom to our show. Dr Hanscomb is a former orthopedic spine surgeon who practiced for more than 30 years and has become a leading voice in helping people overcome chronic pain, anxiety, and other stress-related conditions.

Drawing from both his personal journey through chronic pain and decades of clinical experience, he developed an approach called dynamic healing, which focuses on calming the nervous system and creating lasting neuroplastic change.

In this episode, Dr. Hanscom will be sharing insights from his books, Back in Control and Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind. helping us better understand the connection between chronic pain, mental health, stress physiology, and the body's remarkable capacity to heal.

So, stay tuned for an engaging conversation that promises to empower and inspire your path to wellness. Thank you very much for joining us, Dr. Hanscom.

Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this in the first place and what inspired these books. Well, first of all, when I took my spine training, I never thought I would be doing this.

I don't do spine surgery anymore and I actually quit my practice in spine surgeon to do this because I was a salvage surgeon trained at a high level spine fellowship.

I as a person who was the end of the line after people had five, 10, 15 or 20 operations before they got to me. When I looked back at the spines before any surgery was done, Most of them did not need surgery at all.

So I kept seeing that three to five times every week. Then I went into chronic pain myself from 1990 to 2003 severely. I developed 17 different symptoms. I had no idea what was going on.

Nobody could tell me what's going. And from 1999 when I had my first panic attack on the 520 bridge in Seattle, went on this relentless search about what's going on, what happened.

So my scalp was itching, I had migraine headaches, my ears were ringing, feet burning, back pain, neck pain. I also developed extreme anxiety, depression, and repetitive thought patterns.

Jumping way forward, And in 2020, I met Dr. Stephen Porges, and he and I formed an informal scientific study group that met once a month during COVID, now twice a months.

And we just started diving into the DNA, the mitochondria, polyvagal theory, oxytocin, peptides. We started to uncover the basis of chronic disease, which turned out to be completely different than acute disease.

Dr Bob Navio out of San Diego taught us that chronic diseases is a state where the mitocondria small little organelles in the cell cannot regenerate and heal under chronic stress.

So chronic illness is a state and acute interventions cannot work in a chronic state. Then what blew me away is that I sort of knew that anxiety is just a sensation, that humans use the word anxiety to describe fight or flight physiology, not a psychological diagnosis, it's just the description of your emotions.

And then if you can't control it, it's just an alarm signal. The reason why it is so critical is that this unconscious brain processes about one billion bits of information per second.

And the conscious brain process is about 20 to 40, that's it. So there's massive survival machine creating all sorts of symptoms. We're using our cognitive means to deal with that.

It's a sustained fight or flight, sustained through a physiology, breaks the body down. What I've learned is the that body heals in safety, but it turns out that Physical disease is a state, but so is mental.

It turns out that anxiety, depression, OCD, bipolar, and probably schizophrenia are all physiological states. They're not psychological. So Dr. Navio just gave us a lecture on the medical limits of suicide.

And bottom line is your body is completely run out of fuel. There's nothing left. So anyway, what's happened, I've gone from a very structural basis of learning, that's the way I was trained, took the body's chemistry as a way of creating symptoms.

And the metaphor I like to use is that of a parked car, a park car has no symptoms, you have to start the car for it to function or malfunction. Yeah.

Bruce Lipton is a friend of mine made a point that what is the difference between a cadaver and a living human being? They have the same structure, but the living human being has life and function.

Kadabra has none of that. But in medicine, we become very, very fixated on structure. Well, can you tell us a little bit about like, what does MUS stand for and why is it so wrong and damaging?

So I had 17 different symptoms. It makes no sense. Why would one person have 17 symptoms? Nobody could tell me what was going on. And so the term that was used to describe me is called MUS, medically unexplained symptoms, it came out of the family practice literature in about 2002.

They acknowledged that maybe this wasn't imaginary symptoms maybe it was real. but we don't know what it is and it's medically unexplained and have a good life.

When we look at the chemistry and physiology of the body, every symptom's completely explained. Because in threat physiology, your nerve conduction doubles, the brain itself has microglia, becomes inflamed.

Of course, you have cortisol that takes fuel out of the cells. Then you had the usual fight or flight hormones that keep your body fired up in an intense alert state.

So it's like driving your car down the freeway in second gear, going to break down. Yeah. And we've known this for decades that stress-related illnesses, basically chronic stress is what causes chronic disease.

But I thought stress was psychological. So one thing I did for 13 years was psychotherapy. And I thought all this stuff was psychological, the anxiety, depression.

It turns out that you have such a massive survival response that talk therapy actually makes things worse. And indeed it did. So when I learned to basically calm down the body's physiology, body breaks down in threat, but it heals in safety.

A model evolved called dynamic healing where every living creature, has to access their environment, you have to process the sensory input and the brain puts out signals to the body of either safety or threat.

So it turns out that your input, anger, frustration, talking about pain, et cetera, is input that actually causes your body to go through a physiology.

And as far as the psychology of it, it turned out unpleasant thoughts, unwanted thoughts are sensory inputs and your emotions or physiology is what you feel.

So as a dynamic healing model, you have your input, nervous system and output, and you can change the input. You can increase the resilience of the nervous, system you, can regulate the output.

All of those can induce stage physiology. That's really all you had to do is induce state physiology, and your body knows how to heal. So the term medically unexplained symptoms should be MES, medically explained symptoms.

Every cell and organ responds in its own unique way with the common theme being threat physiology. That's how my cell, patients that heal often have 5, 10, 15 symptoms like myself.

When they heal, they all disappear. Mm-hmm. It makes no sense unless you have a common cause. Yeah. So stress is really, you know, it's always been thought of as a psychological problem.

Right. But why is this concept wrong and why it is so damaging? Well, again, in conscious survival response, we have this miracle machine called the human body.

Again, one billion bits of information per second, it's processing to stay alive. The conscious brain is a latecomer to the party and only processes about 20 to 40 bits per information second.

So you have one million compared to 20-40. Stress isn't the problem, is the response to stress. I mean, stress is inevitable, adversity's inevitable. And so that's bad enough, your body goes into fight or flight, but it's when people get upset about being in stress, become frustrated, that really fires up the physiology.

Can you explain a little more about stress or threat physiology and its effects on the body? Well, we think in fight or flight of adrenaline, cortisol, and a heart race, et cetera.

But again, nerve conduction doubles. Inflammatory cytokines come into play. The brain is microglia, the brain itself is inflamed, literally short circuits.

You're pulling fuel out of the cell with cortisol. And you're simply breaking down your body. They're problem with chronic stress, I never understood this so recently, is that if you take a weightlifter, it's that person's lifting weight, you actually breaking the muscle, right?

So you have to rest between workouts in order to regenerate and heal. I mean, your body has to deal with stress in ordered to stay alive, but when it's sustained, like in modern era, there's no break.

So our bodies were never designed to be under this much stress all the time constantly. Yeah. Why do you think there are so many different symptoms, illnesses, and diseases?

And why do they all resolve as you calm and regulate the nervous system? Well, let's talk about thoughts just for a second. So what I also learned writing this book is that it's physiology first.

In other words, if a person walks in the room that's dangerous, your body's already gone into fight or flight, and then your thoughts come one to 10 seconds later.

So it's physiology first. So we have all sorts of stresses coming at us with all this sensory input. We're already in fight or flight. Then the thoughts interpret the negativity.

And the problem with the human brain is that it cannot differentiate mental threats versus physical threats. So we're in barter with unwanted thoughts that the brain cannot to differentiate between thoughts and physical threat.

We're really in a sustained fight or flight. Like we said before, every organ system is affected. Every cell in the body is infected. There's about 30 trillion cells in body as you well know.

Every cell responds in its own unique way, depending on whether it's kidney, heart, lung, whatever. So that's why there's so many symptoms because so may organ systems are affected.

Yeah. Each one is reacting in his own way. Right. Why is mental pain a bigger problem than physical pain? Can you explain how they arise from the same root problem?

Now, let's go back to the dynamic healing model. You have your input. It could be pleasant or unpleasant. Your nervous system can be calm or hyperactive.

Then your physiology can safety or threat. So the problem with mental pain is you simply cannot escape your thoughts. The brain perceives them the same way as a physical threat.

You cannot escape it. So what do you do? So the metaphor I like to use is that about, think about put your hand over a warm stove, not hot enough to burn your head, but also be very uncomfortable.

What happens to your anxiety when you put you hand on that warm stuff? That increases. Right. Now what if you were forced to hold it there, cannot remove it?

What would happen to anxiety? Yeah, it would go through the roof. Then what would be the next response? You would try to take action or verbalize something or try get out of that situation.

He'd be angry. Yeah. So again, reminding the audience that anger and anxiety are physiological states. They're simply alarm systems and the anger has dopamine.

You fight. The problem is with thought patterns, in the wild you have one predator at a time. With these thought pattern coming at us with almost an infinite number of thoughts, what do you do?

Your hand really is stuck over that stove. Yeah. So what we do in medicine, we're trying to treat the thought, trying constantly to say that it's not that bad.

We try to give medications to see what's going on, help what is going to tolerate it better. And we use distraction therapies, all sorts of programs to try and get the body to cope with it.

The bottom line is your hand is still stuck over the stone. So our inability to escape our thoughts creates sustained fight or flight, which is incredibly unpleasant.

And the problem is when we fight the thoughts, we become entangled with them. Problem is we actually do become our thought. So what happens is that I looked this up the other day.

So I asked, what percent of people have one behavioral or addictive or mental health diagnosis? It turned out to be 70 to 90%. So you think about all the nail-biting, skin-picking, repetitive behaviors.

You think of the different addictions, alcohol, et cetera. Then you can think anxiety, depression, etc. So the combined chance of a given person have those active diagnoses is between 70 and 90 percent.

The literature also shows that only 17% of people know how to thrive. So the question I have, you will do anything to get your hand off the stove. There's only one answer to that problem, and that's turn down the heat.

If you're a person whose hands stuck over the The heat's still on, you don't know how to get it off. You'll do anything to escape the heat, which means we get into these crazy self-destructive behaviors because we don' care.

Our hand is still over the stove. So we have all these coping skills that we feel ashamed about when we actually get in to them. But why would you not do that?

They're basically normal expected coping behaviors. Why would she be ashamed of that if every human being has some degree of? That again less than 10% of people actually are able to well again your hands over the stove.

Yeah, anything to get your hand off that stove Yeah, right. Or tolerate it. Right. So that's why we get into these incredibly self-destructive behaviors, because at some point, you don't care.

Yeah. You're just trying to make the pain go away. That's what's been eye-opening for me is I help people with surgery. We did rehab. Eventually, probably have hundreds.

Well, I do have a hundred patients, maybe a couple thousand now of people that go, what I call radical healing. And I'm one of those people where all my symptoms are gone.

And what I've also learned is the body breaks down in chronic threat, and it heals in safety. And so in the dynamic healing model, you learn to process your stresses differently.

There's ways of doing that. You learn how to increase the resiliency of your nervous system. Learn how regulate your physiology. All three portals are active every day, all day.

That's why it's called dynamic. So it is not about getting rid of the stress, which is stressful in and of itself. It's actually coping with the I don't want to say coping, literally riding the waves, ups and downs, whatever it is, to hit up the tools to actually keep your body in more of a safety physiology profile.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. So repetitive unwanted thoughts are considered something to be managed and not resolved or not solved. Why is that the case? Again, what's happened in medicine, both with mental pain and physical pain, again, in the laboratory, they have shown that mental is less tolerated than physical.

That's why people cut themselves. They want to externalize their pain, plus they want it to be validated. So it was a question I lost by chance. Why is it that we want manage repetitive unwanted thoughts and not solve them per se?

The problem is that the driving force is the physiology. Yeah. So what happened to physiology is like this jet engine throwing these thoughts out the back end of it at a really high level.

They're not controllable and we try to manage or regulate those and it's not possible. And again, the problem is with cognitive fusion, The harder we fight these thought, s the worse they get.

Yes. So again we're treating symptoms. We're trying to help you tolerate your hand over the stove. But the bottom line is you still have this engine driving these sides.

Both with physical and mental symptoms, The key issue is regulating the physiology. So once you start slowing down the driving force, it becomes a solvable problem.

I don't know what to say about this because when I talk to psychiatrists, they say, yeah, we manage OCD. We manage this stuff just fine. Well, not really.

There are some people that are excellent somatic therapists that help people calm down. The essence of healing OCT isn't the thoughts. It's calming down, But if you're bombarded by the thoughts, how do you calm down?

So the emphasis is on skills, not the outcome. If you use skills to calm it down and regulate your body's chemistry, the thought start to abate. Okay.

Can you do that? I'll just say it is solvable. So what are a few of these skills or techniques that you use to help people deal with these repetitive unwanted thoughts?

So let's take the input, your environment. So the two questions are, what you holding on to and what do you putting in? As far as what your putting, we ask people not to talk about their pain, to quit talking about the medical care, come off the internet, quit complaining, don't ask for advice, no criticism, and no gossiping.

Because that's input into your nervous system that comes out with threat physiology. And what I also found out, and I was one of those people, that people in chronic pain, again, the mental pain was my worst part, by the way.

Of all these 17 different symptoms, these repetitive thoughts were the worst by far. I call myself an epiphany addict as I'm on this relentless search to find an answer.

And so people in chronic pain, mental and physical, probably spend over half their life on some part of pain. So you're reinforcing it. No negativity.

Obviously, things like not watching the news, that type of thing is important. Or if you watch really violent sports or activities, same thing. You're putting input in that comes out with threat physiology.

Remember, it's input, nervous system, and the output is safety physiology or threat Yeah. So that's what you're putting into it. The other part is, what are you holding on to?

And that is using anger. If you remain angry at something in the past, that visualization of those thought memories actually fire up the physiology. Processing anger, remember anger is just a threat state and there's ways of actually processing it, but it's such a powerful force that we have what's called a 5-3-2 technique that it is powerful.

It's addictive. Nobody wants to give it up. Nobody wants to give up their anger. This is what you have to defend yourself. It's a defense mechanism. So that was my defense and people like being angry because it has dopamine, it's addicting.

I still like to be angry. Doesn't help my life at all. And I've learned to regulate it, but you can't control it. Yeah. So once you get triggered, we have a 5-3-2-7-8, which is no action and a reaction.

You have to just intellectually know that your thinking brain is not working correctly when you're angry. Take that deep breath, no actions, and let me take a day or two to calm down.

But once you're in anger state, remember that's just a physiological state where your brain is not working correctly, and the second two words are flip the switch.

And I learned this through one of my participants in my study group where it is powerful as addicting. I used to get really angry about being angry because I teach a stuff and wise and whatever.

You can't control it. So by realizing it's an ongoing something that will happen the rest of your life, you can learn how to come out of it relatively quickly.

Basically, there's a book called Forgive for Good that came into my practice about 10 years ago. That's when people started to heal. Forgive. There's always a tipping point.

If you're holding on to something in the past, How do you come out of threat physiology? So that's the input side of it. Just a couple of things about that.

The nervous system, things that increase the resilience of the nervous systems or a lot of work, your work comes into places, sleep, diet, and exercise.

You get the body functioning better, so it's less reactive. If you're not sleeping, that is probably one of biggest factors as far as healing pain is that you have to sleep.

You have to sleep. And then you have your things that you do to increase nutrition and the defenses of the body. So your nervous system is either calm or hyper reactive.

On chronic pain, chronic assault, your body's on high alert. Your nervous is hyper-reactive. Calm down the nervous systems is a big deal. The third category of output, you can't control the output either, but you regulate it.

For instance, breath work, called coherence and breathing, which I know you're familiar with, stimulates the vagus nerve which calms things down. You can rub your forehead which stimulates the fifth cranial nerve, which stimulate the vagus nerve.

Turns out that humming is a big deal. Stimulates the back of your throat, stimulating the Vagus nerve and of course certain types of music really help out.

But there's many things to, I mean the key word is calming. And that's where talk therapy doesn't come into place. So instead of going to talk-therapy which actually serves up the same pot, using calming tools makes a huge difference, both physically and mentally.

Yeah. Yeah, so a hornet's nest has been disturbed is a metaphor about how modern medicine is addressing mental health. Can you expand on this a bit? So you have a nest of hornets and that's a better for for your nervous system and brain and the horn is or your thoughts floating around.

I mean, why do thoughts have any power over you at all? they're not real, it's the deal, right? So what happens is that the hornets are doing the business, taking care of life, you know, feeding, nesting, breeding, et cetera, and somebody shakes the nest.

Well, the hornets are upset. They're very aggressive, they're out there on attack. And what happens in medicine and what we're doing, we try to coax the horns back into the nest, coach them to calm down, talk to them, fight them trying to shoo them away and it doesn't work.

So the answer that I pointed out as far as the physiology part of it is quit shaking the And that's an alert skill. Positive thinking does not work, by the way.

That's a whole different topic. But as you learn to calm yourself down, again, the whole thing is about calming. And the one word I want to throw in here, which I haven't got a chance to get to yet, and this is a big statement, but there's this little book that was talked about, it was given to me by a golf instructor years ago.

It's called A Way to Love. Anthony DeMiller wrote this thing. He defines love as awareness. So when you're angry, you've lost the blood supply and you lost awareness.

If you are anxious, if you worry about something in the past or future, You're not here. You lost your awareness, so what awareness does with thought patterns is absolutely critical.

For instance, do you have these thought pattern about, let's say you judgmental of somebody. So if you're judgmental, it's a problem as far as the brain nervous system.

If you try not to be judgment, all it makes it worse. So what awareness does, you watch yourself being judgment and nods. That's the problem. Watch yourself trying not be judgemental.

It's bigger problem shows you become aware of both energies in the middle. You can just move forward and live your life. The real healing occurs with neuroplasticity of constructing the brand that you want, not fighting the bring that she don't want.

Okay. So then one word to remember from today's talk is the word awareness. Okay, yeah, I like that. I think in your book, you talk about doing a little awareness exercise throughout the day.

Can you describe that a bit? I'm doing it right now. Okay. We call it active meditation. And we actually learned this in surgery from my performance coach who actually was a golf coach also, but basically you become aware what's going on.

You might recognize you're anxious or frustrated and then you just drop your shoulders or maybe you have raised your thoughts or you are just out of control thinking.

What you do is simply place your attention on sensory input for three to five seconds. So right now I'm just feeling the chair, my arms drop down. I would do this in clinic all day long with my patients, just drop it down.

You might have heard my voice drop a little bit. What I'm doing is not magic. I am simply placing my brain from these racing thought patterns to a different sensation.

So the whole process is being connected to the moment you're in. When you choose a sensation, taste your food, feel the breeze, Feel the chair. If you pick sensations, you simply switch sensory input.

I love that. Yeah. So you're just focusing on a physical sensation rather than the racing thoughts. Well, the reason why I like active meditation, because it's real life.

Meditation practice, which is fine. But what you want to do is bring this into your day-to-day life, just get in the habit of processing stress differently, calm yourself down automatically.

The emphasis is on the skills, not the outcome. As you repeatedly do these things, it becomes automatic. And you don't think about it much. And pretty soon you notice the thoughts have dropped down dramatically.

You feel better. A lot of physical symptoms. They don' get better, they resolve. My ears don''t ring. I've been ringing in my ears for 25 years. It's been gone for 20. Wow, that's amazing.

That's amazing. But it's not magic. It wasn't such logical in the first place, but with this fired up nervous system, I'm not sure what happens actually in your ear itself, when the nerve connection slows down, things are calmer.

So whatever set off that re-insensation is simply gone. Not there. Okay. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about the expressive journaling exercises that you recommend and why that's so effective?

So what's been coming up in our study group, which is fascinating, is that people are almost completely disconnected from the physiology. In other words, you may not feel anxious or frustrated, but when I put you on a biofeedback monitor, it's through the ceiling.

Your bowel feedback measures your autonomic nervous system. So what happens is that we have a disconnect from what we actually feel. What the expressive writing does, it allows you to take the thought patterns that you may or may not be conscious of.

Remember, the really negative, unpleasant, bizarre thought-patterns that were suppress. And so what Dr. Pennebaker found out in 1986, by simply writing down the thoughts on a piece of paper and tearing them up, you don't solve them, but you separate from them.

Okay. So I've not seen anybody without exception get better without the expressive writing. You can get it better with these other tools. Remember, in fact, there's an essay written in 1999 about expressive writings called White Bears.

And these top psychologists in the world had no answer for the thought pattern to accept expressive Instead of doing battle with them, they're on the piece of paper.

Dr. Pennebaker is part of a study group who wrote the original research in 1986, and his thing was that people have secrets. Everybody has parts about themselves that they don't want other people to know.

And what also came out in the literature originally was with women with pelvic pain who had been raped or abused and of course don' want to talk about it.

So keeping those secrets takes a lot of mental energy. And you don't have to talk to a counselor, you know how to confess, but simply writing it down on paper is a very powerful way of separating from those thoughts.

That's great. I love that. Okay. Well, what is self-induced deep healing? You don't know. So I'm trying not to cover too much here, but let me just simply define it is that it's what happened to me.

I have no symptoms. It's perfect. If I get stressed out, the symptoms will come back. That means if I quit to my special writing or get fired up too, my skin will, it'll say skin rashes pop up.

And so, well, what happens is generally those chronic symptoms have disappeared. And he's a friend of mine. He's now 93, 94 years old. And this was found out in the stage four cancer survivors who went on to live a normal life.

These people were essentially on their death beds and they survived. So he kept asking Bernie, who are these people? Why does somebody go through a spontaneous remission like that?

He finally said, look, this is not spontaneous. Remission is self-induced healing. I go, what do you mean? So Brenda Stockdale gave a look through her Wednesday group who was a member of this exceptional cancer survivor's group.

And there's several characteristics of an example of cancer survivors, but it's turned out to be the same thing that happens to people with chronic pain.

It's the process. Number one is that you quit looking for answers. If it doesn't make sense, you keep searching the planet for an answer. You're actually reinforcing the problem.

because you're trying to fight the problem. Samuel, people make definitive changes in finances, money, relationships, vocations, whatever it is. They make very definitive chances.

I'm going to live my life like this. And what came out of that conversation with Dr. Lydia Temesha is that if you say, Yes. When you want to say no, in other words, people pleasing, it's actually a negative prognosis for cancer because you're suppressing emotions.

So then people start moving. One of the factors by living life on your terms, you quit blaming. i.e. the anger factor drops down. And the final thing is you lean in to live in the life that you want.

So with chronic pain in general, as you live your life on your terms, live the live that want as opposed to not live a life you don't want, your brain changes that direction.

Yeah. Again, take a charge, go looking for answers, taking control, moving forward with purpose and passion causes your body to go and stay at your physiology.

Again, every patient that heals has the same experience that I did with all the symptoms resolved. That's great. So the brain makes a point people are so busy living that they forgot to die.

Okay, yeah, I love that. I loved that, that's awesome. Well, if somebody is going through chronic pain right now, what would you suggest as far as resources for them?

I'm going to pretend you just walked in my office. And what I've learned is that giving people a lot of education on the first visit is not a good idea.

So I say, look, the, first part of this process is just homework. so I asked him to read my book back then it was back in control. I think for anxiety, et cetera, probably calm your body, heal your mind is better, but they're both at the same spot, different angles of it.

They both have my story in there. and so mine was extreme. And I'm excited just to be here, honestly. So I said, look, do some homework. But the second thing is work on calming tools first.

I mean, you're fired up. You know, the breath work, and do the things you do to calm down. We're kind of calming and learning. The next thing I work is sleep.

If you are not sleeping, none of this counts. And so sleep is the next one. And then eventually over two, three, four months into the anger part of it, because what happened to me is that I never knew I was angry because I spent my entire life being angry as a perfectionist.

So I always thought that was a virtue, but it's really a way of just self-flagellation, which is pretty unpleasant. The anger parts starts evolving into process.

Then the final phase is neuroplasticity. As you live the life that you want, in other words, bring in new data, That's where the healing occurs. So instead of fighting the old circuits, you bring in new data, but please remember this happens every day.

You're stressed every, day you get triggered every and people want to calm life. And what you want do is calm the reaction to the inevitable ups and downs of life So the expressive writing, so I say, look, you're in my office and I'm actually going to read my book.

I do want you to start the express of writing. And this is hard for people, but I used to say look when you walk out of the door in office, I never ever want she to be negative again.

No pain talk, no negativity. The stuff we talked about to stop now and people often look at me and go, well, what do I talk about? I mean, right? They're so used to doing it.

And it takes at least six or eight weeks to slow that down. I do the same thing. We quit talking negatively, and I'm still mindful of it now. But those are real concrete things you could do to start.

Then the emphasis is on the skills. Now we're not becoming professional at living your life, just like you and me both work hard to become professional in what we do.

why not put the same effort into living your life cooperatively, which means also seeing stress more quickly, nurturing joy more consistently, again, back and forth, every day.

And these are probably tools that should be taught to us in kindergarten. They're not very difficult. Yeah, absolutely. So my personal vision, you know, coming out of surgery is that we get focused on structure.

It's like that park car analogy we talked about. But I simply want to take medicine back to the science that we learned in medical school. None of this is new.

Oh, by the way, I do want say one more thing that's going to sound totally backwards, but I also ask people don't believe a word I'm saying. Okay. Why would it say that?

I don' know. So remember the body heals in safety, means by connecting to what is, and people want to believe in something to actually heal. And it's not believing in David Hanscom or my course or books or anybody, because that takes a lot of mental energy to do that, which actually takes you in the wrong direction.

So you want connect with what's real and what real is deep skepticism. I've tried all this stuff, it hasn't worked. Why is David Hance going to help you?

Well, he's none. I can give you a guide of how to connect to your own healing capacity. But what I'm trying to do is teach you how do induce safety physiology and heal.

What I've learned is that once people do that, that the healing is far beyond what i've ever seen. Again, going back to this radical remission or self-induced deep healing, people really do their own symptom fee.

And what's exciting to me is once they get out of the whole, what they call the abyss, There's no end point. So our lives keep expanding. And the more it expands, the less the pain circuits become active.

And it's just an ongoing dynamic growing process. So that part's been exciting. It's not like I do this pain clinic and come back and have to deal with the symptoms again.

You have make an active decision to go back into the hole to do. Anyway, so that's the exciting part for me is that not only has the process been sustained, is self-directed, it has major public health implications because you don't need pain clinics to this.

People like yourself are very helpful to guide people along the way as far as details and questions. So this dynamic healing model has just been totally different for me.

And I did quit my practice to manage pain. I quit practice because I kept watching this deep healing. That's wonderful. Yeah. Amazing. Well, we're going to put your website in the show notes and links to your books as well.

So thank you so much for joining me today's conversation has been extremely enlightening. Thank you everyone for joining me on the functional edge. I hope today's episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life.

If you found value in what you heard, don't forget to hit subscribe and share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review. It's the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people.

So for more resources, updates, and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. And until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy, And keep living on the functional edge.

Thank you for joining me on The Functional Edge. I hope today's episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life. If you've found value in what you heard, don't forget to hit subscribe, share the podcast with someone who needs it and leave a review.

It's the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people. For more resources, updates and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com.

Until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy and keep living on the functional edge.