Transcript
Dr. Sanjay Gupta (0:00)
We start today with a number, 20%. That's the approximate number of adults in the United States living with chronic pain. That's the kind of pain that can linger for months or even years. And around 8% of adults live with what's called high impact chronic pain. That's the kind of pain that can make everyday tasks like getting out of bed, going to work, connecting with others simply feel like monumental challenges. Chronic pain is not like acute pain. You should think of these as totally different entities. When you touch a hot pan, for example, and you learn to avoid it, that's acute pain. That teaches you a lesson. Chronic pain, that's more complicated. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Sometimes it lingers long after the original injury. It can wear you down emotionally. It's difficult to measure, but at the same time, it's very real and very pervasive. 20%. I came across this number when researching my new book on pain, and it immediately jumped out at me. That's 1 in 5 people, 50 million people in the United States alone. That includes people that I know personally. Maybe it includes many of you who are listening. And at one point it included a man named Eric Garland.
Eric Garland (1:21)
Did you ever deal with pain yourself?
Eric Garland (1:24)
I have. I never talked about that in a public forum, but when I would wake up in the morning, I would be unconsciously searching my body for the pain. Is the pain here today? You know, is it here today? And I would look for it now.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta (1:37)
That feeling Eric is describing is so relatable. But what makes Eric's story unusual is what he did next. Dr. Garland is a clinical therapist and a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego. He's also the developer of a mind body therapy called more, which stands for Mindfulness Oriented Recovery Enhancement. It's a program that he's used to help thousands of patients reduce their chronic pain by teaching them, paradoxically, to actually lean into their pain. And it eventually ended up helping him as well. So I wanted to have Eric on the show today to explain what MORE actually is, how it works, and what the decades of science behind it can teach us about the brain's role in pain and how we can harness that knowledge to feel better without any of the potential side effects of medication. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is chasing life.
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