Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

I have a pretty severe back injury - double pars fracture and significant spondylolisthesis from an accident (not a car accident). For many years i was in incredible pain, but it just kept going, sometimes getting a lot worse. When this happened I would go get some imaging done to make sure there weren't degenerative changes that needed to be addressed - you should never, ever get back surgery if you don't need it, so I am cautious about it. But I noticed something, all on my own, and that is that it seemed to correlate with periods of intense stress. I still have a ton of stress, but recognizing that actually kind of made a tremendous difference.

I hesitate to add a link to this on the thread, but there is an interesting story around chronic pain actually being psychological and there are now some high quality studies coming out.

https://journals.lww.com/painrpts/Fulltext/2021/09000/Psycho...

I especially hate to link to LessWrong but this is an actually decent thread on the topic:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgBJqPv5ogsX4fLka/the-mind-b...

I didn't know about any of this and had never been exposed to any of it when I drew my conclusions and started to feel less pain. Don't get me wrong, there are still things that will set my back off, but now I probably go actual years without even thinking about it.

> I hesitate to add a link to this on the thread, but there is an interesting story around chronic pain actually being psychological and there are now some high quality studies coming out.

This is a misinterpretation of these studies which is common throughout this thread.

The research isn’t showing that chronic pain is a psychological condition. It’s suggesting that some cases of nonspecific chronic pain that specifically do not match the symptoms of typical physically-rooted pain are psychological. The participants in this study were filtered for this criteria.

For some reason, people see this idea and lose the nuance, concluding that most or all chronic pain is actually psychological.

I think if someone matches the description used by the author of the substack for this HN entry (he describes his chronic pain as random and popping up all over his body) then pursuing the psychological explanation would be a very good idea.

However, it’s getting frustrating to see all of the reductionist claims that “chronic pain is psychological”.