Dr. Rachel Zoffness on The Truth About Pain
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[0:27]Rachel's off-ness PhD is the author of Tell Me Where It Hurts,
[0:31]the new science of pain and how to heal.
[0:33]Dr. Zoffness is a pain psychologist and thought leader
[0:36]revolutionizing the way we understand and treat pain.
[0:39]She is an assistant clinical professor at UCSF,
[0:42]lectures at Stanford,
[0:43]and consults in the development of pain management programs
[0:45]around the world.
[0:46]Dr. Zoffness's new book, Tell Me Where It Hurts,
[0:49]is being translated into more than 25 languages.
[0:52]Welcome, Rachel.
[0:53]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked,
[0:55]delighted to meet you and get to talk about.
[0:57]Tell me where it hurts the new science of pain
[1:00]and how to heal.
[1:01]Congrats.
[1:02]I have been following you and your work for such a long time
[1:05]and it's such an honor to talk to you.
[1:07]It's an honor to talk to you too.
[1:08]My gosh, you hope so many people
[1:10]and you have a whole new disruptive view on pain
[1:14]and how to handle it and have made people feel so good
[1:18]when they thought they couldn't.
[1:19]I mean, that's like magic, you know?
[1:21]It's like total magic.
[1:23]I, when I started, I've been studying the science of pain
[1:26]for a really long time, but when I started doing this work,
[1:29]I was working with a lot of teenagers.
[1:31]I happen to really love teenagers,
[1:33]especially the ones you get for an hour
[1:35]and then get to give back to their parents.
[1:37]Teenagers just really want like a grown up who will talk
[1:40]to them straight and working with teenagers and pain
[1:44]was selfishly very transformative for me
[1:47]because when you see a 16-year-old who's been in bed
[1:50]for four years, get up and go back to life,
[1:53]like it just became, I'm not kidding,
[1:55]it became like an addiction for me.
[1:56]Like this is my calling, it's my life's work.
[1:59]And I actually wrote this book in part
[2:02]because one of something a parent said to me,
[2:04]a parent said to me, why is this stuff you do
[2:09]just for the patients who come to your office
[2:13]and full transparency?
[2:14]Like it just didn't occur to me
[2:16]that anyone would want to read something that I wrote.
[2:19]But I pitched my idea to, I wrote two workbooks first
[2:23]so I pitched directly to the publisher,
[2:24]but then when I wanted to write this book,
[2:26]it was such a long and arduous process
[2:28]trying to get an agent.
[2:30]But yeah, eventually the book was born
[2:32]and I'm really proud of it.
[2:33]And I do hope it goes into the world
[2:35]and helps some people, like that's why I'm here.
[2:38]Why would you think nobody would want to read
[2:40]what you had to say?
[2:42]How much time do you have?
[2:43]I have half an hour.
[2:46]You can really get into it.
[2:47]Yeah, we really can get into it.
[2:49]I think it's a bit of an affliction
[2:52]that women in particular have and women
[2:55]in particular who are successful,
[2:56]like imposter syndrome is real.
[2:58]And I mean, even now when I'm going on podcasts,
[3:01]I feel like who am I to be on podcasts?
[3:08]Yeah, it's just an imposter syndrome thing
[3:10]but I had someone very wise say to me,
[3:13]if you're experiencing imposter syndrome,
[3:16]it means that you are growing past your comfort zone
[3:21]and when you feel those imposter feelings,
[3:24]it means you're doing something brave.
[3:26]And I have really glommed onto that
[3:29]because I feel like an imposter all the time.
[3:31]Oh my gosh, well, you weren't just on podcasts.
[3:34]I just saw you on Dax Shepard,
[3:36]like what the heck, how did that happen?
[3:38]Yeah, yeah, so I started,
[3:42]I am someone with absolute public speaking anxiety.
[3:46]Like I was the kid in school who would try
[3:50]to do public speaking and would either pass out,
[3:52]turn red, feel like vomiting and run to the bathroom
[3:55]or some combination of all those things.
[3:57]And I promised myself just before the pandemic started
[4:02]that I would work on that.
[4:03]And the way you work on that is like,
[4:05]it's exposure therapy.
[4:06]It's gradually exposing yourself to the thing you're scared of.
[4:09]So I was cold pitching myself before I had an agent
[4:14]before anything.
[4:15]I was cold pitching myself to small podcasts
[4:17]where they were talking about pain.
[4:19]So like physical therapy and occupational therapy.
[4:22]And I discovered that I loved being in conversation
[4:25]with smart people who were asking smart questions.
[4:28]And I also loved this idea.
[4:30]Like I don't have a platform, but there are people who do.
[4:33]So if there's a piece of knowledge
[4:35]that really needs to be disseminated,
[4:37]those are the people I need to find
[4:39]because they can help me do that.
[4:41]So I was cold pitching myself to small podcasts
[4:44]and they were getting bigger and bigger,
[4:46]but I was also getting braver.
[4:48]Like I can do this thing.
[4:49]Like right now it's just you and I.
[4:50]Like I can pretend there's not going to be hundreds
[4:53]or maybe thousands of people watching this
[4:55]because you and I are having a conversation.
[4:56]And you're great.
[4:57]And I like talking to you.
[4:58]So it's okay.
[4:59]But the podcast we're getting bigger and bigger
[5:01]that I was doing, but I was okay with that.
[5:04]And I ended up pitching to a doctor
[5:07]who goes by ZDOGMD.
[5:10]And a couple of the episodes went crazy viral.
[5:13]And then as recline came calling,
[5:15]I mean, it's been like a very fascinating journey actually
[5:19]from like it was just self-actualized, you know?
[5:21]It was just there's a message.
[5:23]It's important.
[5:24]I want people to hear it.
[5:25]How do I spread that message?
[5:27]And just like a lot of hustling really is the answer.
[5:31]Yeah.
[5:32]Okay.
[5:33]So the important message that you were willing
[5:36]to just put yourself out there,
[5:38]go out of your comfort zone
[5:40]because you believe so strongly in it.
[5:42]What the crux of that?
[5:44]And obviously I've been through your book
[5:46]and so I know some of the tools and everything
[5:48]and the science, but what do people need to know about pain?
[5:51]Yeah, the crux of the message is this.
[5:54]We have all been told that pain,
[5:58]which is what I study and research and write about,
[6:01]is a purely biomedical problem,
[6:03]like something to do just with anatomy and physiology
[6:07]that requires a purely biomedical solution.
[6:10]So like usually in the form of pills and procedures.
[6:13]And I want to say for folks who are listening,
[6:16]this information is not just for like chronic pain patients.
[6:21]Every single one of us is going to have pain someday
[6:24]if we don't already.
[6:26]Our kids, our parents, everyone we love,
[6:29]pain is coming for all of us one day
[6:31]if it hasn't already.
[6:32]And it just seems so critical to me
[6:35]that we all understand what it is,
[6:37]how it works and what to do about it
[6:40]because that information is not beyond any of us.
[6:43]So pain, it turns out,
[6:46]is never something to do just with our bad back
[6:49]or just with our aching knee.
[6:51]It's easy to believe that,
[6:53]but science says that pain is ultimately constructed
[6:57]by our brain, by our brain.
[7:00]And one of the reasons we know this
[7:02]is because of a condition called phantom limb pain.
[7:05]Phantom limb pain occurs when someone loses a limb
[7:07]and arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain
[7:12]in the missing body part.
[7:13]Like I treated a patient who had lost an arm
[7:16]and he had phantom hand pain, like the hand was gone,
[7:20]but he could feel the hand cramping and spasming.
[7:22]And that tells us pain cannot be constructed
[7:26]just by the body part that hurts.
[7:28]Pain must ultimately be constructed by the brain.
[7:32]And one of the most important pieces of information
[7:36]I have learned on my journey of studying pain
[7:39]is that the parts of the brain that make emotions
[7:43]also make pain.
[7:44]Like people have heard of the limbic system,
[7:46]the amygdala, right?
[7:48]We know those as part of our like stress
[7:50]and anxiety system, our threat system.
[7:52]Every single sensory message from our body
[7:56]filters through our brain's emotion machinery
[7:59]before it becomes the thing we call pain.
[8:01]So to me, this myth in Western medicine,
[8:06]like either you have physical pain
[8:07]and you see a physician or you have emotional pain
[8:10]and you see a psychologist, it is time for that to end.
[8:14]Emotional pain feeds physical pain,
[8:17]physical pain feeds emotional pain.
[8:19]They are never separate.
[8:20]Like the brain and the body are connected 100% of the time.
[8:25]So if I have, let's pretend, back pain.
[8:30]I mean, we don't actually have to pretend.
[8:31]Let's just say, I'm sorry, so many people have nicks or backs
[8:36]or something to do with sitting over a computer all day,
[8:38]something like that.
[8:39]But I'm convinced it is pain, like it is pain.
[8:42]And so I take out Bill or whatever, a heating pad.
[8:45]Are you saying, and I know that there are diagrams
[8:48]and things around this, and I know you don't love
[8:51]the like, make the smiley face and it's a skill.
[8:55]One to 10, or whatever.
[8:56]But are you saying, if I could just somehow harness
[9:00]all the tools that you can put out there,
[9:05]the pain itself would go away completely?
[9:09]Okay, so I said what pain isn't.
[9:11]I said pain is never like a purely biomedical physical problem,
[9:15]but I didn't say what pain is.
[9:17]Pain is science shows this word, this jargony word
[9:22]that I actually hope everyone remembers
[9:23]because it's super intuitive.
[9:25]Pain is a biopsychosocial problem,
[9:28]which means, yes, there's biological components.
[9:31]Of course, tissue damage, system dysfunction, inflammation,
[9:35]diet, exercise, and sleep.
[9:36]We all know those matter.
[9:38]And also, there are psychological components to pain,
[9:41]like we talked about emotions are constantly changing
[9:43]the pain alarm, and also sociological ingredients
[9:47]in pain, like for example, trauma.
[9:49]We've all known forever that the body keeps the score.
[9:52]Like that has been known for a real long time.
[9:55]So history of trauma can amplify pain too.
[9:58]So what I'm putting forth
[10:00]and this book is basically an amalgamation
[10:02]of 65 years of neuroscience,
[10:04]which shows that there are all these biopsychosocial
[10:08]ingredients that go into creating a high pain recipe.
[10:12]And you just gave me one of those ingredients,
[10:14]and it's true for me too.
[10:16]When I'm sitting at my computer for hours and hours
[10:18]without moving, staring at the screen,
[10:21]feeling stressed out, my pain volume is higher.
[10:25]So I know that I have to look at the ingredients
[10:27]in my pain recipe and that changing
[10:29]those ingredients will change my pain.
[10:31]So like for me, definitely sitting and not moving
[10:34]for many hours and staring at my screens
[10:37]is a high pain ingredient.
[10:38]So like what I do now, true story,
[10:41]I set a little timer for 20 minutes.
[10:43]And every 20 minutes I get up and move my body
[10:46]if I can go for a five minute walk.
[10:47]I do that if I can only stretch.
[10:49]I do that if I can do 10 jumping jacks.
[10:52]I will do that.
[10:52]It's like whatever I need to do
[10:54]to stop my pain alarm from screaming.
[10:56]That's what I do.
[10:58]What about people living with chronic pain
[11:01]or long COVID or all these things
[11:04]that I have a lot of people on my podcast
[11:06]who talk about the fact that they're living with pain.
[11:07]And it's just something that they have to cope with.
[11:10]And it's just part of their daily life
[11:12]and maybe they've learned to manage it.
[11:14]What about them?
[11:17]Yeah.
[11:18]I think this pain recipe concept
[11:22]is sort of at least for me and my patients.
[11:25]And I treat chronic pain.
[11:26]I don't treat acute pain.
[11:27]Acute pain just to define terms.
[11:29]Acute pain is three months or fewer.
[11:31]So that's like the pain of childbirth
[11:34]or a broken bone or an acute injury or an acute illness.
[11:38]Chronic pain is three months or longer.
[11:40]And chronic pain has a different science behind it.
[11:44]Like different neurobiology altogether.
[11:46]And what we know about chronic pain
[11:48]is that it changes our central nervous system.
[11:50]It actually changes our brain and spinal cord over time.
[11:54]And we know that, yes, the body part
[11:56]that hurts matters, but the brain matters too.
[11:59]So the pain recipe concept is just basically this.
[12:01]Are you someone who likes to cook or bake?
[12:04]Are you asking me?
[12:05]I like to make it.
[12:06]What do you like to bake?
[12:07]Do you have a favorite thing?
[12:08]I like to bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch.
[12:11]Oh, I wish that I could be.
[12:12]What do you like to bake?
[12:13]Do you like to?
[12:14]I actually don't.
[12:15]I'm like, I'm a true New Yorker.
[12:17]I just like, I use my oven for storage.
[12:21]It's terrible.
[12:23]My husband is the cook in the family
[12:25]and I'm very grateful for that.
[12:26]But so if you take chocolate chip cookies,
[12:28]you know that you take certain ingredients
[12:31]and you add them in a certain order.
[12:33]And then you bake them on like a tray of a certain size
[12:36]in an oven with a certain temperature
[12:37]for a certain amount of time.
[12:39]And if you change those ingredients,
[12:41]you get a different outcome.
[12:43]If you want really good cookies, you do it right.
[12:46]But if you do it wrong to high temperature,
[12:48]you forget the flour.
[12:50]Cookies come out different.
[12:51]The same is true for chronic pain.
[12:54]There's always a recipe for chronic pain
[12:56]just as there's a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
[12:59]So for me, I live with chronic pain.
[13:01]And one of my favorite things
[13:03]to talk about with my patients is I always ask them
[13:05]when they come into my office,
[13:07]can you tell me the ingredients for a bad pain day?
[13:11]Like even if it's just three or four
[13:13]and usually people can give me, do you know yours?
[13:15]You said sitting at a screen,
[13:17]are there others you can think of?
[13:18]I mean, more of what you were saying before,
[13:21]just being said, being said in a certain place
[13:24]for a long period of time.
[13:25]Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[13:26]So like some of the others in my recipe
[13:29]that show up in other people's too is like poor sleep.
[13:32]I know that when I sleep really poorly,
[13:35]especially over many days,
[13:37]my body's gonna hurt more, poor nutrition.
[13:40]Like this is true across my patients.
[13:41]Like if we're eating poorly,
[13:43]the body's gonna hurt more.
[13:45]I know during periods of high stress,
[13:47]when I have a lot of deadlines
[13:48]or I'm not saying no to things,
[13:50]I'm saying yes to everything.
[13:52]I know that my nervous system freaks out,
[13:54]my body hurts more.
[13:55]So it's a bunch of things that are always in my recipe
[13:58]and those are fluctuating and changing.
[14:00]And some I don't have control over.
[14:02]Like I don't have control over my genetics
[14:05]or like family history of migraine.
[14:06]Like I can't control that.
[14:08]But there are a lot of things in my recipe I can control.
[14:11]Like inflammation responds to movement and rest and ice.
[14:16]And heat, you know?
[14:17]So if inflammation isn't ingredient,
[14:19]there are things we can do for that.
[14:21]If sleep is an ingredient,
[14:23]I can help you put together a sleep hygiene plan
[14:26]that will help with what's called pain somnia,
[14:28]which is like the insomnia that comes from
[14:31]having a lot of pain.
[14:32]So like once we map out the ingredients
[14:34]in our high pain recipe for chronic pain,
[14:37]we can actually change the recipe to a low pain recipe.
[14:40]And we can start having days with less pain.
[14:43]Can you tell me more about your chronic pain?
[14:46]Yeah, I've lived with pain on and off my whole life,
[14:48]but also like I have in an aging body.
[14:51]And as I age, I'm finding things are hurting more.
[14:54]So I'm sort of always thinking about my recipe
[14:56]and looking at it and tweaking it.
[14:58]And I feel like it's a good practice for me
[15:00]because everyone who walks into my office
[15:03]has their own unique pain recipe.
[15:05]And that's part of my job is to help them figure out
[15:08]what is their high pain recipe
[15:10]and what are the strategies we can use
[15:12]to start transforming it to a low pain recipe?
[15:15]You had a section in the book about highly sensitive people.
[15:18]Can you talk about that?
[15:19]Yes, oh my God.
[15:21]This was so fascinating to me.
[15:22]So there's a book called The Highly Sensitive Person.
[15:26]Have you read it?
[15:27]Yes, you read everything.
[15:29]Yeah, I remember reading it by Elaine Aaron.
[15:31]I found it so fascinating.
[15:33]And there's been so much research
[15:35]since her pioneering book showing
[15:37]that about 25% of us are highly sensitive people.
[15:42]And I'm gonna say what that means.
[15:43]So we talked about how there's always a recipe for high pain.
[15:46]One of the ingredients in our pain recipes
[15:49]is our genes, our genetics.
[15:52]And it has been shown that for people
[15:55]who are highly sensitive, that is in part genetic.
[15:59]So it turns out there's all like animal species
[16:02]across the animal kingdom
[16:04]have highly sensitive members of the species.
[16:06]So what does it mean to be highly sensitive?
[16:08]That word can be so misunderstood and stigmatized.
[16:13]So I live in the Bay Area.
[16:16]And a highly sensitive seismograph,
[16:18]which picks up earthquakes, is the machine you want.
[16:22]A highly sensitive machine picks up small bits of data
[16:28]and brings them to the fore,
[16:29]brings them to your attention.
[16:31]So a highly sensitive person, a highly sensitive brain,
[16:34]detects small bits of sensory data from the body
[16:38]and amplifies them so that you pay attention.
[16:40]Because ultimately what is pain?
[16:42]Pain is our body's danger system,
[16:44]our danger detection system.
[16:46]It exists to save our life.
[16:48]And if you have a sensitive nervous system,
[16:52]your body, your brain is gonna amplify those danger messages
[16:55]so that you do the things you need to do to be safe.
[16:58]Maybe you rest, maybe you get help,
[17:01]whatever you need to maybe you go to the emergency room.
[17:03]So there are a lot of things that will sensitize our brain.
[17:07]Genetics having a highly sensitive nervous system
[17:10]is one of the ingredients that goes into having
[17:12]a highly sensitive brain.
[17:14]But also trauma will sensitize the brain also.
[17:19]So there's a lot of things that make us more sensitive.
[17:21]It just was so interesting to me
[17:23]that one of the ingredients might be
[17:26]being a highly sensitive person.
[17:28]And a highly sensitive person is someone also
[17:31]who walks into the room and can feel other people's emotions
[17:35]even though they don't want to.
[17:37]Like the sensitivity comes out in all sorts of different ways.
[17:41]So interesting, my gosh.
[17:43]So what does it feel like?
[17:45]I know you described it at the beginning
[17:47]to know that you can make people's lives better
[17:51]using the tools that you've developed.
[17:53]Yeah, it has become a bit of an addiction for me.
[17:56]My goal or like it feels like my calling
[17:59]is to spread this information so that people have it.
[18:03]Like what's the point of me being the holder
[18:06]of all of this neuroscience?
[18:08]It's not useful.
[18:08]Like it's helpful for the patients in my office.
[18:11]But there are so many tools we can all use
[18:13]to change our bodies and change our brain to change pain.
[18:15]So gosh, what does it feel like?
[18:17]I mean, I get these messages on social media
[18:21]or through my website that move me to tears.
[18:23]Like people send messages about how they couldn't walk
[18:26]and they're using the pacing protocol.
[18:27]And now they can walk, it's really crazy actually.
[18:31]It's the only thing that motivates me to keep doing this
[18:33]because I don't know if you can tell.
[18:35]I'm very uncomfortable.
[18:36]Like public speaking is so uncomfortable for me.
[18:39]But the messages I get of change,
[18:41]like real change in real people,
[18:43]that's the thing that motivates me.
[18:45]Not only could I not tell that you're uncomfortable,
[18:47]but I have been thinking about how articulate you are
[18:50]as you've been talking.
[18:51]Like you have a cadence to your voice
[18:54]and an authority in an understanding way
[18:57]that I'm like, I could just listen to her forever.
[18:59]Of course she loves like going on podcast.
[19:01]I know, thank you.
[19:03]Yeah, I think it's just that I talk about it a lot
[19:06]because it's something that's close to my heart.
[19:08]And I've meant what I said at the beginning,
[19:10]like I think about the kids who I was working with
[19:12]at the very beginning of this journey.
[19:14]They are in my mind and sometimes I hear from them.
[19:17]And they're like, out in the world doing things
[19:20]and they were bedbound for like four years, you know?
[19:22]So yeah, that's the feedback for me.
[19:26]That's the feedback loop is like,
[19:28]sometimes I feel like I'm shouting into a void.
[19:30]You know, like I hear all these stories about people
[19:33]who have chronic back pain
[19:34]and they go for the first surgery and it doesn't work
[19:37]and they go for the second and it doesn't work.
[19:39]And then they have the third and the fourth.
[19:41]But they haven't targeted other things in the pain recipe.
[19:43]Like they might have a history of trauma.
[19:46]They might have really terrible sleep.
[19:48]They might be on a white food diet,
[19:50]which is something I see in my office all the time.
[19:52]And like those other ingredients aren't being addressed.
[19:56]So I lose hope sometimes like,
[19:58]oh I'm shouting into a void.
[20:00]Then when I get that feedback in real time,
[20:02]it gives me hope that maybe people are listening
[20:06]and it could help even if it's just one person
[20:09]and maybe they'll spread the word to someone else.
[20:12]Yeah.
[20:13]Does the pain recipe work for a cue pain?
[20:15]I know you said that wasn't your specialty
[20:18]in that you feel chronic pain, but...
[20:20]Yeah.
[20:20]And when comes with a broken limb
[20:22]or something that's happened more recently
[20:24]and they're really in a lot of pain than one.
[20:27]The answer is absolutely yes.
[20:29]So we said that the brain is the part of the body,
[20:32]ultimately, that constructs pain.
[20:33]And one of the parts of the brain that makes pain
[20:36]is our prefrontal cortex,
[20:38]which is the part of the brain responsible for attention.
[20:41]So like, I promise I'll get to where I'm going with this.
[20:45]So when we have a cute pain,
[20:47]the more we think about the body part that hurts,
[20:50]this is true for chronic pain too,
[20:52]the more it tends to hurt.
[20:53]Like, I don't know if you have pain,
[20:55]but if you're right now thinking about your back
[20:57]and focusing on your back,
[20:58]what the brain does, the prefrontal cortex,
[21:01]will start zooming in on the body part
[21:03]you're paying attention to for examination,
[21:06]for like, it's like a close-up.
[21:07]Like, oh, what's going on in here?
[21:09]Something going on?
[21:10]Do I need to get your attention?
[21:11]Do I need to amplify this message to get your attention?
[21:13]And the opposite is also true.
[21:16]When we are distracted and engaged
[21:18]in a beloved hobby or activity,
[21:20]the prefrontal cortex zooms out.
[21:22]So attention is focused on other things.
[21:24]And when attention is directed away
[21:26]from the body part that hurts,
[21:28]that lens pulls up,
[21:29]and you can briefly forget about your pain.
[21:32]And I always ask my patients about this,
[21:35]can you tell me a time you were so absorbed in some activity,
[21:39]you briefly forgot your pain?
[21:40]And everyone can tell me.
[21:42]So like, for patients of mine who have,
[21:44]like, you know, serious procedures in the hospital,
[21:47]or need to get blood drawn all the time,
[21:49]or face a lot of needles and that's scary,
[21:52]I always coach them to find distractions.
[21:55]Like, can you watch a very distracting, funny video?
[21:58]Like, for me, that's Robin Williams.
[22:00]Can you ask the phlebotomist to talk to you
[22:03]and ask you questions?
[22:04]Like, I do that.
[22:05]If I'm getting a blood draw, I will say,
[22:07]ask me anything.
[22:08]Like, ask me about what I do,
[22:09]ask me about pain, and I'll forget.
[22:12]I'll forget about the needle, you know?
[22:14]So even for acute pain,
[22:15]there's a lot of strategies we can use to change pain value.
[22:19]Does anything change when you're working
[22:21]with little children?
[22:23]Like, let's say, 10 and under, something like that?
[22:24]Yeah, so I tend to focus on kids, like, twins, teens,
[22:28]and up.
[22:29]But there are experts who work with young kids,
[22:32]and they use similar strategies.
[22:34]Like, there's something called Buzzy the Bee,
[22:36]and Buzzy the Bee, it's a magic.
[22:39]Like, I don't, every parent should know about this.
[22:41]Buzzy the Bee, it vibrates,
[22:43]and you put it on the child's skin,
[22:45]like, where the shot is supposed to go in,
[22:47]and here's the neuroscience of this.
[22:49]It's amazing.
[22:50]Touch messages reach the brain faster
[22:53]than pain messages and danger messages.
[22:56]So like, if you have a vibration,
[22:59]it will actually distract your brain
[23:00]away from the sensation of the shot.
[23:02]And there's something similar for adults,
[23:04]it's called a shot blocker.
[23:06]So like, there are things we can do
[23:08]to help kids
[23:09]to minimize their experience of pain,
[23:11]to distract their brain,
[23:13]and also to make them less afraid,
[23:15]because fear will amplify pain.
[23:17]So like, the more relaxed,
[23:19]the less afraid we are, the less pain will hurt.
[23:22]Wow.
[23:23]I know, isn't that so cool?
[23:24]I wish every mom and dad knew about Buzzy the Bee
[23:28]and these other strategies we could use.
[23:30]Like, every pediatrician should have one.
[23:31]They're not expensive.
[23:33]Maybe I'll get one for mine.
[23:35]Yeah, I'll do it.
[23:37]Yeah, do it.
[23:38]Where are you taking this movement next?
[23:41]Oh, gosh, I have to tell you,
[23:43]like, I grew up wanting to be Oliver Sacks.
[23:46]I saw him come and speak up around
[23:47]when I was an undergrad nerd there,
[23:49]when I was like studying with a pain neuroscientist there,
[23:51]and it was the best day of my life.
[23:53]My life dream actually was to meet him,
[23:55]and I am not gonna get to do that,
[23:57]because sadly he has passed.
[23:58]And for anyone listening who doesn't know who he is,
[24:01]Oliver Sacks was a brilliant science writer
[24:04]who would write about some esoteric medical topic,
[24:08]and he would tell you some luminous patient stories.
[24:11]And suddenly you were interested in a thing.
[24:13]You were like, Oh, aphasia, that's cool.
[24:16]And I wanted to do that for pain.
[24:17]Like, this sort of was the dream.
[24:20]Like, the dream was, how do I take all this information
[24:23]and tell some anonymized patient stories
[24:27]that are compelling and share with the world
[24:30]the true science of pain?
[24:32]Like, information they need that they can use
[24:35]in real time starting now to change their bodies.
[24:38]And that literally is where tell me
[24:39]where it hurts came from, that's where it came from.
[24:42]So I genuinely don't know what now.
[24:45]If you have some ideas, you can let me know.
[24:47]I'm a little overwhelmed by the book tour thing.
[24:50]Like, is the truth, but I'm excited
[24:54]and like deeply moved by the fact
[24:56]that people seem to hear the information.
[24:59]It feels resonant and like they're telling their friends
[25:02]and they're telling their dads with chronic back pain
[25:05]and they're talking to their kids about it.
[25:06]So like, yeah, I don't know what happens next.
[25:10]But I'm hoping that it has a life of its own.
[25:13]I'm hoping it sort of just sort of goes out
[25:15]into the world and helps people
[25:16]in sort of like a ripple effect fashion.
[25:19]That's my hope.
[25:21]I am gonna go out on a limb and guess
[25:23]that you enjoyed the movie Awakenings
[25:26]with your Robin Williams Oliver Sacks references.
[25:29]Yeah, Awakenings.
[25:31]Yeah, it was a book.
[25:33]Yeah, it was Oliver Sacks book first
[25:34]and then Robin Williams played Oliver Sacks in the movie
[25:37]and it's one of my favorites I watch it all the time.
[25:41]Amazing, so good.
[25:42]Yeah, great all congratulations.
[25:44]Thank you for all the work that you do to help everybody
[25:47]and I just love it.
[25:49]It's simple easy to understand.
[25:50]I mean, the book is not simple, but you know,
[25:52]oh yeah, the recipes and the next steps
[25:55]and they're easy to grasp
[25:57]and you dilute all the information
[26:00]into something quite tangible and actionable
[26:03]and how great is that?
[26:04]So congrats.
[26:05]I really appreciate that.
[26:06]It means a lot coming from a reader like you.
[26:08]You're such a book expert.
[26:10]Thanks.
[26:11]All right, take care.
[26:13]Thank you so much for all your time.
[26:15]Bye.
[26:16]Okay, bye.
[26:17]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi
[26:20]formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
[26:22]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[26:25]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[26:28]and spread the word.
[26:30]Thanks so much.
[26:31]Oh, and bye the books.