Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

> For the next 4 years, I continued to accumulate weird and persistent pains in different parts of my body.

Anyone who is accumulating weird pains in random, different locations should definitely pursue some of these alternative explanations. Another sign that these techniques are appropriate is if the pains come and go depending on your mood or situation (worse when working, disappear when doing something fun) or are prone to suggestion (someone talks about their back pain and then you have back pain for the following days or weeks).

However, I’m also getting tired of the people who benefit from this techniques deciding that their explanation for chronic pain covers everyone. It’s a huge trend in parts of tech Twitter right now to apply these theories to all chronic pain. A small number of people who had unexplainable pain and addressed it through meditation, therapy, and similar techniques are now pushing it as a far more universal explanation. It really needs to be applied to the appropriate situation, not used as a universal treatment for chronic pains.

This parallels similar trends with topics like PTSD, where a smaller group of people have benefited from therapy that addresses past trauma and now they’re trying to export the theory that past trauma and PTSD is the explanation for all psychological ills. Again, matching the right treatment to the condition is critical and being open-minded is important, but beware of people who are preaching that doctors are misinformed and you should subscribe to their app, blog, newsletter, or course instead.

On your first point, the moving of symptoms is not uncommon in patients with chronic pain - and yes definitely a sign something not normal is going on!

On the second, I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread (on a different comment) that it's critical to determine if a structural cause is at play (i.e. tissue/nerve damage or something else causing inflammation). It is unfortunate however that many doctors are not familiar with modern pain science so I'm hoping spreading awareness via patients (and some practitioners) will change this.

In the next few blog posts this very thing will be discussed (i.e. exploring when it's likely something is mind related vs the body [though I will focus primarily on the former in this series] - as you're 100% correct sometimes it's the body and sometimes it's the mind, and sometimes it's both!).

r/cfs ... those are the wise sages. They've heard it all. They know what to do. They know the BS. They warn each other about it.

That they do. I've been working through chronic fatigue for six years now, and I spent two years thinking it was somatic. No amount of meditation, therapy, socializing, antidepressants, or supplements made a dent. Thankfully I found my way to r/cfs which has fantastic advice on dealing with long-term chronic illnesses. It's a little depressing, but also freeing to accept that there truly is no cure to these horrible illnesses (there should be, but there still isn't). I'm glad I ruled out somatic symptoms so I'm sure that it's not that, but I'm also glad that I now understand that a lot of chronic fatigue is 100% biological. If I ever recover I plan to go into biochemistry to help all of these people who truly cannot be cured with today's technology.