What is Pain Reprocessing Therapy?
When we experience pain, we need to do two things: find out what is causing it and find out how to stop it. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) covers both.
It can often feel like we have pain all over our bodies and that the pain we experience must be coming from exactly that place where it hurts. However, it isn’t that simple – pain is an add-on feature that our brains create to alert us to any threats we experience, including ones from our work, relationships, and the world inside and outside our heads. PRT is an exciting new development in the treatment of pain because it addresses the pain right where it starts – in the brain! PRT turns down the pain alarm and, with some practice, turns it off altogether.
A randomised controlled study has shown that the majority of people undergoing Pain Reprocessing Therapy to treat back pain experienced almost zero pain after their course of this therapy. Caroline is also seeing significant pain reduction among her patients, some of whom have lived with pain for many years.
What can I expect from a PRT session?
If you were to observe a PRT session, you would see two people just sitting quietly and talking now and then; it is a much more reflective form of physiotherapy than you might have been to before; it may also include some discussions and exercises regarding your feelings and emotions.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy includes:
- Physiotherapy assessment: this allows Caroline to make sure there is not a real threat in your body by doing a thorough subjective and physical assessment, reviewing how your pain started, what it’s like now, and any tests you have had or should have done.
- Understanding your pain: once Caroline has determined that there is no clear and present danger in your body, she will help you understand your pain and make sense of how and why it has shown up in your life at this moment.
- Quiet reflection exercises: during these exercises, you’ll be asked to feel the sensations in your body in a new and more curious way, without preconceptions, and with a sense of safety rather than fear.
- Practice: like anything new we do in our lives, we need to practise this new way of feeling our pain and sensations.
In Caroline’s words, “I don’t expect anyone to fully believe this will work until they see the pain reduce or go away completely. This is always the goal of the therapy – to get rid of your pain. Scepticism of this approach is understandable and expected, especially if you have tried many other things already.
If you’re interested, you can read more about PRT in my latest blog post, ‘Pain Reprocessing: A Breakthrough in the Understanding and Treatment of Pain’.”
