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Informationen zum Autor Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv Klappentext A groundbreaking mind-body protocol to heal chronic pain, backed by new research. Chronic pain is an epidemic. Fifty million Americans struggle with back pain, headaches, or some other pain that resists all treatment. Desperate pain sufferers are told again and again that there is no cure for chronic pain. Alan Gordon, a psychotherapist and the founder of the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, was in grad school when he started experiencing chronic pain and it completely derailed his life. He saw multiple doctors and received many diagnoses, but none of the medical treatments helped. Frustrated with conventional pain management, he developed Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a mind-body protocol that eliminated his own chronic pain and has transformed the lives of thousands of his patients. PRT is rooted in neuroscience, which has shown that while chronic pain feels like it's coming from the body, in most cases it's generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain. PRT is a system of psychological techniques that rewires the brain to break out of the cycle of chronic pain. The University of Colorado-Boulder recently conducted a large randomized controlled study on PRT, and the results are remarkable. By the end of the study, the majority of patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free. What's more, these dramatic changes held up over time. The Way Out brings PRT to readers. It combines accessible science with a concrete, step-by-step plan to teach sufferers how to heal their own chronic pain. Leseprobe In my mid- twenties, life was good. I was in graduate school for psychotherapy at USC. I was an outgoing, active guy. I hung out with my friends. I went to Dodgers games. I was in a kickball league (my team even made it to Nationals!). But during my second year of grad school, everything changed. I developed severe lower back pain, and it completely derailed my life. Even something as simple as sitting through a movie became a two- hour- long nightmare. Dodgers games were out of the question. I couldn’t watch sports, let alone play them. The stiff classroom seats at USC caused me so much pain, I had to buy a soft, lean- back chair from Office Depot and roll it from class to class. In case you’re wondering, lugging a giant chair everywhere you go is not great for your social life. I saw three of the leading back specialists in Los Angeles. One of them told me that my pain was caused by a disc herniation. One of them told me that my symptoms were due to disc degeneration. One of them told me that my back hurt because I was just too tall. I couldn’t make myself shorter, but I tried every other treatment imaginable: physical therapy, biofeedback, acupuncture, acupressure. Nothing helped. I got so many MRI scans of my back, my friends joked that my spine was turning into a magnet. After about six months, I got an epidural injection. It didn’t cure me, but it cut my pain in half. Life was once again bearable . . . for about eight days. Until one morning, out of nowhere, I felt like a grenade went off in my head. It was the most excruciating headache I’d ever had. And it stayed. Chronic daily headache, the internet told me, had no known cause and no known cure. Terrific. After seeing even more doctors, I found a headache specialist who diagnosed me with high cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure. He prescribed some medication, which didn’t help. Here’s the thing about high- CSF- pressure headaches: the pain is worse when you lie down. So I couldn’t sit up because it hurt my back, and I couldn’t lie down because it hurt my head. My father, practical man that he is, suggested that I try to find a way to live at a forty- five- degree angle. Thanks, Dad. Over the next several years, I developed the following ad...
