From passive to proactive

It is all too easy to become passive from chronic pain—worn down by the stress, the lack of sleep and the fatigue that can accompany chronic pain, going to one doctor after another in hope that the next test, the next drug, the next treatment will finally fix the problem for you or at least give you some relief. You can become resigned to the mistaken beliefs that 1) the best you can hope for your chronic pain is acceptance with resilience, and 2) all you can do is hope that someone else can do something to help you.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can become proactive. You have already taken a first step by reading this far in this document. You can continue reading the document and finding out about some of “The Basic Science of Pain.” Or you can jump directly to “Four Useful Methods and the Science Behind Them“. These methods for how to overcome chronic pain all are based on the facts that, 1) chronic pain involves brain processes that are not useful, and 2) the brain can be retrained away from pain.