🧰📈 Reclaiming Work as a Health Outcome
What if getting back to work wasn’t the end of healing, but part of it? Work isn’t just economic. It’s emotional, social, and deeply tied to our identity. This piece rethinks how “return to work” can be reframed as a therapeutic milestone, not a discharge note.
Work isn’t just what we do — it’s where our identity, movement, and meaning often live. But when pain enters the picture, we tend to treat work as a risk factor instead of a recovery milestone.
What if we flipped the frame?
What if getting back to work is healing?
This piece explores how reclaiming meaningful work — not just as employment, but as purpose — could become one of the most powerful, overlooked outcomes in modern pain care.
🔁 The Scapegoating of Pain: How Medicine, Meaning, and Identity Collide
When pain defies simple explanations, we often search for someone—or something—to blame. In medicine, that blame often lands on the patient’s own body. This piece explores how modern healthcare unconsciously echoes ancient scapegoating rituals, turning ambiguous pain into mechanical diagnoses and shrinking identities around fear. But there’s another way: one that restores meaning, agency, and the full complexity of what it means to hurt—and to heal.
When pain shows up without a clear cause, we panic — and medicine often reaches for easy scapegoats. “Bone on bone.” “Degeneration.” “Instability.” These labels offer comfort through certainty, but they can quietly erode a person’s confidence, identity, and sense of agency. We trade complexity for simplicity, and in doing so, the body becomes the villain.
But what if pain isn’t a crime scene… and the body isn’t the criminal?
This post explores how the search for answers in pain care mirrors ancient scapegoating rituals, where uncertainty is offloaded onto something we can name — even if it’s wrong. It challenges the biomechanical myths still dominant in medicine and offers a new path: one that honors complexity, restores trust, and rewrites the story from “I am broken” to “I am adapting.”
🧩 Pain Without Meaning: Why Pain Becomes Suffering When It Loses Its Story
Most people think pain is what breaks them. But it’s not the pain itself—it’s the loss of meaning. When pain feels random, confusing, and permanent, it turns into suffering. This piece explores how pain becomes bearable—even transformative—when we reconnect it to story, purpose, and dignity. Because pain doesn’t need to vanish to heal. It just needs to make sense.
We often assume it’s pain that breaks people. But it’s not the intensity of pain—it’s the absence of meaning that makes it unbearable. Just like hardship without purpose feels like despair, pain without story feels suffocating. When pain shows up without warning, lingers without cause, and resists all the usual fixes, it begins to feel personal—like a sentence rather than a signal.
This is when pain becomes suffering. Not because it’s severe, but because it’s senseless. The nervous system is trying to protect you, but when there’s no “why,” we begin to fear the pain itself. We question our bodies. We lose trust. We shrink. But if we can reconnect pain to meaning—if we can understand it as adaptation, not just damage—we give it context. We transform it from something to fear into something we can move with.
Pain that makes sense doesn’t disappear, but it becomes bearable. It becomes a process, not a punishment. When pain is seen as intelligent—something your body is doing for you, not to you—it opens the door to recovery, even before the pain fades. The goal isn’t just to eliminate pain—it’s to make it make sense again.
🕵️♂️ Why Are We Still So Afraid of Pain?
Why are we still so afraid of pain?
Despite all the science showing that pain isn’t always a sign of damage, we still treat it like a threat. We still rate it, avoid it, and design entire treatment plans around its elimination.
This piece explores how fear, culture, and medical systems have conspired to make pain seem dangerous—even when it’s not. It challenges us to shift our relationship to pain from one of fear to one of understanding, and to teach patients that pain isn’t the enemy. It's the start of a conversation.
For all our progress in neuroscience and rehabilitation, one stubborn fact remains: we’re still terrified of pain. Not just because it hurts, but because we’ve built a culture around avoiding it at all costs. Pain is marketed as a defect, a flaw, a failure. And even clinicians, trained in modern pain science, can get caught reinforcing the fear.
But pain isn’t the enemy. It’s a signal—sometimes a protector, sometimes a messenger. When we learn to listen to it, rather than eliminate it, we shift from helplessness to agency.
If we want to change the pain conversation, we have to stop fearing it first.
Read the Full Post on Substack ➡️
🌱 The New Story of Pain: From Broken to Becoming
What if pain isn’t a glitch in the body—but a signal of possibility? The old story treats pain as damage. But the new story reframes it as an adaptive, intelligent process rooted in meaning, memory, and connection. This shift could transform not only how we treat pain, but how we relate to our bodies—and ourselves.
We’ve inherited a story where pain means something is broken. The body is seen as a machine, and pain is the red warning light that something needs to be fixed, replaced, or silenced. This story built our protocols, powered our clinics — but it hasn’t healed us. In fact, it might be part of what’s keeping us stuck.
The new story of pain isn’t about brokenness. It’s about process. It tells us pain is a signal — not of damage, but of protection, perception, and potential. Pain is shaped by meaning, memory, and experience. It reflects not just what’s happening in our tissues, but what’s happening in our lives. And it can change — through story, movement, relationship, and trust.
This shift asks us to move beyond “what’s wrong?” and toward “what’s needed?” Beyond suppression, toward conversation. Beyond protocols, toward presence. When we embrace this new story, we don’t erase pain — we give it a place to move, to teach, to transform.
You are not broken. You’re becoming.
🧠 The AI Inside: Why Chronic Pain Isn’t Just a Longer Version of Acute Pain
Chronic pain isn’t just “pain that lasts longer.” It behaves more like artificial intelligence — adapting, learning, and protecting patterns. To change the pain, we have to change the system.
Most people think chronic pain is just acute pain that won’t go away. But they’re not the same thing — not even close.
Acute pain is like a reflex. It responds to damage, follows a predictable path, and usually fades as healing happens. But chronic pain behaves more like artificial intelligence: it adapts, it learns, and it builds patterns based on your history, beliefs, fears, and environment.
This isn’t pain as a symptom — it’s pain as a system. If we want to change the output, we have to change the way we understand it. Chronic pain doesn’t just protect you from injury. It protects a pattern. And that means it can be re-trained.