UPCOMING TRAININGS

Monthly practitioner training from Freedom from Chronic Pain
Run by Hal Greenham and Howard Schubiner
Designed as a certification professional development program with three free months.

Ongoing training in Pain Reprocessing Therapy
October 26 - November 22, 2024
OR January 11 - February 7, 2025

New online course with Howard Schubiner:

Collaborators in Belgium organized a training with Dr. Howard Schubiner A 5-day course about the neuroscience of pain, new clinical practices, and effective therapies to reverse chronic pain.

https://forest-lighthouse.be/en/unlearning-pain/

The course is now available online and includes: 12 hours of in-depth lectures with Howard Schubiner, case studies, clear practice guidelines on how to work with a partner, clinical resources, essential mnemonic sheets, extended readings, a completion certificate, subtitles in English & French

To contribute to this list, please submit your training to us via email

** Please note these trainings are not affiliated with This Might Hurt, we cannot answer questions about them.

ONLINE ANYTIME COURSES

Pain Reprocessing Therapy Training (CE credits available)

PPDA Online Course (CE credits available)

Ovid Dx
A mobile app that offers training for any health and well-being practitioners who treat clients or patients with mind-body conditions.
It consists of four modules: 1) Pain neuroscience and education of patients, 2) Assessment of neural circuit conditions, 3) Treatment of neural circuit conditions, and 4) A module designed for physical therapists and others who do manual medicine. The material is written, audio and video-based and was created by Alicia Batson, MD and Dr. Howard Schubiner. Physicians can obtain 6 CME credits for viewing the modules and completing the evaluations

Beyond Pain Education

There is now a fully asynchronous version of the Beyond Pain Education course available, which is designed by Charlie Merrill, MSPT, a physical therapist, and Howard Schubiner, MD. For information on that, please email Charlie directly at charlie@Mperformance.com

FREEDOM FROM CHRONIC PAIN PRACTITIONER'S TRAINING
with Howard Schubiner, MD, and Hal Greenham, Somatic Psychotherapist BSc (Psych), BA, Radix BCP

We highly recommend this 8-week course as a fantastic way to wrap your head around EAET, PRT, and other tools to help patients with chronic pain. Each week there are detailed lectures and readings as well as live sessions to workshop the tools. You will walk away with a complete overview of the process.

They have both a synchronous and asynchronous version of this training. Sign up for their email list to be notified of the next live training.

What therapies are featured in the film?

Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) — This therapy is listed as a “best practice” by the Department of Health and Human Services for people with chronic pain to combat the opioid epidemic. In a trial with fibromyalgia patients published in the journal PAIN, people randomly assigned to EAET had a 50% reduction of pain at three times the rate as people randomly assigned to CBT (cognitive behavior therapy, the standard treatment). This study, presented in the film, can be read in full here. A description of how the treatment works can be found here.

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a new diagnosis and treatment paradigm that helps patients unlearn chronic pain by retraining their brains. A primary method is to work directly with the fear of pain and fear of damage, which are often a primary drivers of symptoms.

A few studies have indicated that about 85% of people with chronic back pain do not have structural damage that explains their pain. And many other symptoms like migraines, digestive disorders, abdominal pain, and fibromyalgia are also not characterized by structural or tissue damage. PRT helps people retrain their nervous systems to unlearn neuroplastic pain pathways that are creating severe, debilitating, and treatment-resistant pain syndromes.

PRT is part of a radical paradigm shift that new neuroscience has enabled, which challenges conventional pain psychology & medicine. It makes use of breakthroughs in understanding how the brain uses predictive coding for sensory processing, which means that by expecting pain, and by fearing injury, the brain can maintain or even create debilitating pain.

After a successful PRT treatment, they know intuitively their chronic pain is not a sign of tissue damage. The pain comes and goes without triggering as much fear, tends to lessen over time, and is no longer mistaken for a structural injury. The primary author of the study on PRT at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Yoni K. Ashar, PhD, and Alan Gordon, LCSW go into more depth in this article. The PRT protocol was published here.

The first major NIH-funded trial of PRT has shown very promising results for people with an average duration of 10 years of back pain. 66% of those who were randomly assigned to PRT became pain-free or nearly pain-free.

More resources for PRT can be found on our site, here.

Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) — This treatment has been around since the 1970s and has had dozens of RCTs investigating its effectiveness. Dr. Sarno recommended it especially for people with severe symptoms that are treatment-resistant. His collaborator, Arlene Feinblatt, built a protocol for helping chronic-pain patients process pain, anxiety, and emotions differently so that symptoms lessen over time.

The innovators of EAET (Mark Lumley & Howard Shubiner), have referred to their therapy as a “simplified form of ISTDP,” which is easier for clinicians to learn and offer to patients. ISTDP can be a powerful, robust option, especially for people with treatment-resistant forms of chronic pain.

*Note: ISTDP falls under the umbrella term “experiential dynamic therapy (EDT)” which includes other popular, effective therapies like Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). In EDT, the goal is to feel sensations of emotions directly in the body, and to overcome internal blocks against anger, guilt, and sadness. After a successful therapy, all feelings, including joy, are experienced more fully.

TMS coaching — Sarno’s preferred term for brain-induced pain was Tension Myoneural Syndrome. While most who research his treatment have dropped this term, it is still a favorite by many hundreds of clinicians and people who recovered from reading his books, and who now offer coaching based on the “Sarno model.” You can find these peer coaches on the TMS wiki.

Other therapies — Of course, there are many therapies that are helpful for people with chronic pain. We limited our list to these therapies because they were all touched on in the film. During our research, these four therapies came up the most frequently by healthcare professionals who emphasize that a large portion of chronic pain patients have no structural damage that explains their pain.