Note: These recordings were created from a 3-day summit that took place in January 2021.
Click HERE to view the Summit Schedule
Chronic pain is a complex problem, and understanding all the aspects of it in a given patient is the key to successfully treating it. For many health professionals and patients, however, the problem is considered currently unsolvable. Fortunately, cutting-edge understandings in our neurophysiology have opened a door to a new paradigm for, not just managing, but solving chronic pain. This emerging approach is being successfully used by an increasing number of health care providers across the country.
This summit focuses on the primary keys to the pain problem: central nervous system activity and the autonomic nervous system’s roles in modulating the metabolic, endocrine, and immune responses to threat through the lens of the Polyvagal theory. This 3-day summit was structured as follows:
The goal of this summit is to present a deep analysis of the body’s response to threat and to provide the scientific understanding and clinical practices that will enable clinicians and patients to create a shift to safety.
Note: You will have access to view these recordings for 6 months from the date of purchase.
Chronic pain is a disease state that is generally considered one to be managed, not solved. There is tremendous frustration amongst clinicians in treating chronic pain because results are often poor, patients are angry and the costs to society are crippling, but the last ten years of research have revealed many new answers that have not been implemented in clinical care, until now. The science now shows a new pathway to a powerful shift from the structural model of chronic pain to one based on addressing core neurophysiology. The information in this course will also be relevant to mental health professionals for addressing emotional pain, which is effectively treated by this new multi-dimensional framework and approach.
Acute pain is a protective evolutionary mechanism in the service of survival. There is nothing useful about chronic pain. When pain becomes chronic it is less about structural, nerve or tissue damage and more about the central and autonomic nervous system’s sustained hypervigilant state to support defense. Emerging research points us in the direction of the “one nervous system” model as being the key to resolving chronic pain.
When we are chronically under a physiological state of threat (chronic pain, life demands, unresolved traumas, etc.), our survival response activates the central and autonomic nervous system that creates a vicious cycle of inflammation and sensitization of the body. This is coupled with the synergistic mental effects of depression, anxiety, anger, hopelessness and the maintenance of chronic pain. Polyvagal Theory, being at the center of the threat cascade, provides a unifying strategy for chronic pain sufferers to recruit innate internal resources to retune their CNS and ANS to experience feelings of safety. Optimizing the body’s neurochemical state will promote a deep sense of physical and mental well-being and mitigates chronic pain.
Click HERE to view.
PROGRAM CO-HOST
$199
($99 for those who attended the Summit live)
Les Aria, PhD, a pain psychologist who has been practicing for the past 16 years with Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in Northern California, served as the Lead Pain Psychologist for Kaiser Northern California to help redesign the chronic pain workshop curriculum to incorporate modern pain science, mindfulness and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT).
David R. Clawson, MD, a practicing physical medicine and rehabilitation doctor in Seattle, WA, believes in a conservative and holistic approach to treatment prior to more aggressive care.
David Hanscom, MD, an orthopedic spine surgeon whose practice focused on patients with failed back surgeries, quit his practice in Seattle, WA to present his insights into solving chronic pain, which evolved from his own personal battle with it.
Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is founding Director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium, is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland.
