Healing What Hurts (How Neuroscience is Cracking the Mystery of Chronic Pain)

For millions of people, pain is a daily fact of life: back pain that will not resolve, migraines that seem to arrive from nowhere, fatigue that makes ordinary tasks impossible, or symptoms that seem to move through the body without a clear explanation. Too often, the search for answers leads to inconclusive tests, conflicting diagnoses, and the devastating suggestion that the suffering will last for life and must simply be managed.

But pain is not always what we have been taught to believe it is. In this groundbreaking exploration of chronic pain, award-winning author, historian, and journalist Nathaniel Frank, Ph.D., traces the history of pain from ancient ideas about suffering to the modern presumption that pain must originate in the place where it is felt. Drawing on neuroscience, medicine, psychology, history, and his own experience with chronic pain, Frank explains how pain can be very real — and felt in the body — while often being influenced by an overprotective, dysregulated nervous system.

Healing What Hurts introduces the science of neuroplastic pain, showing how education, emotion, and emerging recovery strategies can help break the fear-pain cycle. By understanding that the brain is neuroplastic — capable of changing throughout life — readers can begin to see a path forward: toward calming their nervous system, reducing fear, and exploring new possibilities for healing.