Hope for Healing Episode 14: Chronic Pain Recovery Stories with Dr. John Stracks | Cormendi Health, Chicago
Video: Watch the full session here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsLghFvHGko
Dr. Stracks: Good evening, and welcome to episode 14 of the Hope for Healing video podcast. I'm Dr. John Stracks, joining you from my office in Chicago, and I'm here this evening with three current patients of mine: Leah, Brendan, and Matt. Before I introduce them, let me tell you just a little bit about Hope for Healing. Hope for Healing is a joint effort between the people at the Curable app and me. For those of you who aren't familiar with one or the other, I'm a physician in the Chicago area who focuses on the elimination of physical symptoms using mind-body medicine methods. Curable is an amazing app focused on the same goal. We've been working together since their inception about five years ago.
A couple of other notes before we get started. We're doing this as a panel discussion, which is unusual, and because of that I'll ask Leah, Brendan, and Matt to give some background about their stories and then respond to some of my questions in turn. We've given ourselves up to two hours to tell these stories and make sure there's enough time for everybody to talk. If we do have a little bit of time at the end, we'll take some answers to some common questions.
Secondly, I want you to know that I've been able to expand my telehealth practice significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I'm working to sustain that even once the pandemic is over. So no matter where you are, if you're feeling stuck with your symptoms, feel free to reach out to my office through my website at cormendihealth.com. My staff will get in touch with you to talk about how to set up an appointment with me to talk about your situation.
And lastly, just a second to talk about my framework for talking about and healing chronic pain. Many of you know what we're discussing as mind-body medicine, meaning that our body can express what's going on in our minds or in our lives. That's universal; we all do that. It doesn't make us bad, it doesn't make us sick, it only makes us human. It really only becomes bad if you enter a medical system that doesn't understand this concept and assumes that all physical symptoms are physical in origin. Human beings have always expressed our lives in our bodies, and we always will. So our goal is to help you understand that and learn what to do about it, so that it's no longer physically uncomfortable or painful for you.
Meet the Guests
With that, I will introduce tonight's guests. I'll give each of the three of you an opportunity to tell a little bit more of your story in a second, but this is just a little background to get us started. Leah, raise your hand. Leah is an educator who recently left her classroom teaching job to work in educational policy. She got her first migraine at age 28, which then developed into debilitating daily headaches. Brendan, raise your hand. Brendan is an attorney and a commercial insurance broker. Seven years ago he began to experience chronic pain and swelling in his right ankle and was told that he should never engage in high-impact activities again, and for a while he even struggled to walk short distances. Matt, raise your hand. Matt is also an attorney, who suffered from chronic pain in his arms for eight years and was essentially unable to work, sleep, or at all enjoy life.
Each of the three of them, in their own way, found and was able to work with the idea of mind-body medicine, found me, and started to work with me individually. They then met during one of my classes a little over two years ago. Once that class was over, they came to me with the idea of working in a regular mind-body medicine group, which has met every single month for the past two years. Working and being involved in a community of healing is one of the topics we'll explore tonight, but first I want to hear about their individual stories.
So Leah, Brendan, Matt, I am super excited to have you here and to share your stories of initially illness and then healing. I want to start by saying that I am super grateful to have worked with all of you and to be able to continue to work with all of you, and extremely grateful to have you three as my guests here on Hope for Healing this evening. Welcome. We have a lot to cover because you have a lot of stories to tell, so I'm just going to jump right in. Our goal for the evening is to give everybody who's watching a sense of where you were, where you are now, and what you did to get to where you are at the moment. I'm going to call on each of you one by one to go through aspects of this part of the story.
Brendan's Story: Chronic Ankle Pain and Swelling
Dr. Stracks: Brendan, before we started you drew the short straw and we agreed that you would kick us off. Can you tell us a little bit about how you found yourself, at a relatively young age, in a state of chronic pain?
Brendan: Sure. Well, first I just want to return the sentiment. Very grateful to be here and to be part of this group. Sometimes when I get asked this question, I really don't know where to begin, especially the longer I've gone on. But I guess I'll start with when the pain started, and that was about my mid-20s. I was living in Chicago. It was a pretty stressful period of my life, practicing law as a young lawyer in a foreign environment. I had always been very active in sports and athletics. I really enjoyed playing basketball, tennis, running, and cycling, and had pretty much my entire life. Starting about my mid-20s, I just started to notice a little ankle pain and a little swelling after I would play sports. It became a little bit more pronounced, and it was something I just kind of marked in the back of my mind: hey, this is something I need to check out. Probably I just need to take it easy for a couple of days, get my ankle a break, that kind of thing.
But over the course of, I'd say, months, it steadily got worse. The swelling continued to go up, the pain continued to increase, to the point where I figured, okay, this is serious enough that I should probably get it checked out. So I went to a physical therapist. I didn't want to see a doctor yet; I figured I could just do some physical therapy, strengthen my ankle, and it would be fine. Of course, after probably about six weeks of physical therapy, they threw their arms up and said, hey, we don't know what to do with this swollen ankle, you should probably go see a doctor. So I did, and we did all the imaging, and the imaging came back and it was pretty rough. The doctor said, listen, I think we need to do a full ankle reconstruction. Your ligaments are in pretty rough shape, you've got some arthritis, and as a young guy, you've been pretty hard on your joints playing a lot of sports growing up.
That diagnosis was pretty devastating. I did not accept it, so I thought, okay, I'm going to get a second opinion, and ultimately got a second opinion from another doctor who disagreed. He said, listen, I work with a lot of NBA players, I've seen bad ankles, yours isn't that bad, I think we should just scope it and see what happens. That was much more palatable to me. I did the scope, and he said, yeah, you should be back up and running in six weeks, I don't even think we need to give you a physical therapy script, you should be good to go. I came out of surgery, and six weeks later not only was I in pain, I was in excruciating pain, and my ankle had swollen to the size of a melon. It was not good. That just sent me on a path, over the course of probably five years until I found mind-body medicine, of struggling to find an answer for this pain and seeking all sorts of different medical opinions. I did a full day at the Mayo Clinic and saw a bunch of experts, and ultimately the conclusion was: you should never play sports again, stick to low-impact activities, all the other doctors are wrong, I think your first doctor was right, this is a pretty rough situation, and the only thing we can recommend for you is regenerative medicine, which is on the forefront. Try stem cell therapy, those kinds of things, to see if we can regenerate the cartilage and tissue in your joint.
I tried that for months upon months upon months of getting stem cell injections and prolotherapy injections and all sorts of injections in my ankle. Frankly, it was my only hope and my only choice to get back up and running again and figure out some of this pain. But it became clear after about three or four months of going down that route that it just wasn't going to work there either, and the pain continued to get worse and worse and worse, to the point where I had difficulty walking short distances. I had become a young father at that point, was having trouble playing with my kids, and was having trouble enjoying life as a person in my late twenties. So that's kind of where I was.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, and you know, it drives me crazy because I hear all the time when physicians tell patients, "You need to stop exercising, you need to stop doing what you love." The research on exercise clearly shows that people will exercise to the extent that they like it. So if we as medical professionals say to people, "Don't do what you like, do this instead," we have essentially removed this incredible healing method from them. You were in your late 20s at that point, right? So to hear that message is, as you said, devastating.
Leah's Story: Daily Migraines and Chronic Headache
Dr. Stracks: All right, well, thanks for that background. Leah, I'm going to move on to you. Can you tell us, similarly, what had happened that found you in a place where you were having pain on a daily basis?
Leah: I had my first headache when I was 28, and when I say that, I literally mean my first headache ever. I never had one after a stressful night studying for an exam or a night out drinking or any of those; I literally never had physical pain. It was the beginning of the school year, which as a teacher is a stressful time, and I had a zigzag go through my vision, which was very strange. Many migraine people know that is called an aura. I had my first migraine, and that lasted a couple of hours. It was very strange. A couple of fellow teachers told me to pop some Tylenol and I'd be back in no time, and it just dissipated. I didn't think too much about it until the following week, when I got my second migraine. Starting that date, I had a headache or migraine every day following. It was a very sudden shift for me, from a time of physical health to a time of being in very excruciating pain, very, very quickly, which naturally led me to a lot of doctor's appointments as I tried to figure out what this was.
I saw a neurologist who very quickly told me it wasn't a big deal, take a couple of triptans and it will dissipate. Then I called him back two weeks later, explaining that the migraine was still here and wouldn't leave. My first couple of months were really, really hard. I spent a lot of time researching, trying to figure out what was going on, calling doctors, trying to get in to see headache specialists, which was very challenging, and going to urgent care centers and receiving pain drips and things like that. But nothing could really make the pain budge. It wouldn't matter what pain pill I took or what medication I was given; very rarely did they make a big difference in my pain. I think that's the starting point of me going through a lot of the Western medical model: looking for specialists, being told that there could possibly be an answer, and following through on whatever the doctors told me to do.
Gratefully, early in my search I met a headache specialist in New York who really just honored my pain, and I think that was one of the most important things for me, as someone who was experiencing chronic pain that wasn't visible: to have someone acknowledge that my pain existed. He used the tools he had to try and help me, which were medications, scripts for physical therapy, coming in for IV drips, and days of injections, but nothing really worked. As a teacher I was pretty much debilitated. I went from working a full-day schedule, a very promising, top-of-my-class teacher, to working half days, and then eventually I decided to go on medical leave since I couldn't be in my classroom. I was noise sensitive, so I wasn't able to go out to restaurants and bars. I also lived in New York City, which is very loud, so I would walk around the city with noise-cancelling headphones on to try and drown out some of the sound. I carried earplugs with me at all times to stuff in my ears. I have a memory of my husband and me attempting to go to a restaurant and hearing the sound of cutlery banging as they were cleaning forks and knives, and just leaving in tears and so much pain.
When I eventually went on medical leave, I ended up going to an outpatient chronic pain program in Florida, where I grew up, and started to learn a little bit about some alternative healing modalities. But it was very much this idea of "we're just managing your pain." I learned about biofeedback therapy, I learned about physical therapy, I worked with a cognitive behavioral therapist, and I also received IV drips and different types of medications. The idea was, we're going to help you try and manage some of these symptoms and find ways to bring back some of the things you like to do in life, but this isn't going to change, or we don't necessarily have a lot of indication of how this will change.
At that point my doctor had given me a diagnosis of a rare headache disorder called new daily persistent headache, which essentially means the headache is new, it comes out of nowhere, you have it every day, it's very persistent, and it doesn't respond to medication. It has a pretty hopeless and terrible prognosis if you've ever googled it. At that point I was trying to get comfortable with the idea that this could possibly be my future, but there was also a lot of resistance in me that that would be the answer. I spent at least another year, before I found mind-body medicine, working through integrative medicine with diets and nutrition, physical therapists, acupuncture, and a lot of different types of modalities, trying to find some relief, but also really struggling with this diagnosis and what it laid out as my future.
Dr. Stracks: And this was a significant shift in your life at that point, right? Prior to this you lived in New York City, you worked a full-time job, you enjoyed going out, you had friends and a husband.
Leah: Correct. Yes. I was super active. I was a varsity athlete in college. I loved working out and exercising. I was very dedicated to my job. I was dating people at the time, had multiple friends, lived in New York City, and so it was a huge shift. It was also really challenging as a 28-year-old, because I looked around and no one else was experiencing what I was experiencing. I remember going to my best friend's wedding and having to leave halfway through because of how loud it was, and just how crushing that was as a really young person, experiencing something that I couldn't make sense of and saw no other people experiencing. It was truly very isolating for me.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, and it's really, for both of you and my own experience too, super confusing. A lot of people have heard the podcast I did with Curable in 2017 talking about how I learned about this and my experiences. Same age, late 20s, and I have this distinct memory, which I can still remember 23 years later, of being in a yoga class for people who are disabled and having three people help me with a simple backbend, and having this thought: I was a varsity college athlete, how did I get here? It seems impossible.
Matt's Story: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Widespread Arm Pain, and Opioid Dependence
Dr. Stracks: So thank you for that background. Matt, I'll move to you, a similar type of story. Can you give us the background for where you were over those years?
Matt: Yeah. My physical pain started when I was 24 or 25. I was in my first year of law school and started to get pain widespread throughout my arms, my fingers, my shoulders, and my head. I went the very conventional route: my general practitioner, and we tried some anti-inflammatory medication and physical therapy. All the time I'm still in law school, and it's getting worse, to the point where I have to stop typing and just absorb as much as I can of the lecture without taking any notes. Then I was referred to an orthopedic surgeon who did a surgery, and it just continued to get worse. So I branched out to see a wide variety of concentrically narrowing specialists, like a rheumatologist and a neurologist and geneticists. Eventually one of the geneticists diagnosed me with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and had me go see a specialist in that syndrome, which is a hypermobility disorder. It took a long time to get in to see that specialist, and as that was happening, the pain was getting worse and worse. I had a second surgery. It had gotten to the point that I was having a lot of difficulty falling asleep. I would wake up at two in the morning in so much pain that sometimes I would vomit. Because it was in my head, I ended up shaving my head entirely so that I could put this pepper cream on that essentially just burned my scalp slightly. And along the way, a pain management doctor had prescribed me opioids, so I became heavily dependent on that.
Finally I got in to see the specialist for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and I'll never forget, she made the analogy. She said Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is kind of like if you were born as a Pinto car. So if you were a Pinto, you need to go super slow, you need to get double the oil changes you would normally get, you need to stay off of bumpy roads, and if you do all of that, you might last a fairly long period of time, but you can't do what other cars do or you'll just break down. That was crushing to me. It was also, I thought at the time, super helpful. If I'm reflecting back, I was like, okay, I just need to do this, and that's what I did. She said you need to wear a neck brace, so I looked like one of those dogs that has the little cone thing, and I had this hat-helmet thing that was an ice thing. So I've got that, I've got my shaved head, I've got my cone. She said you need to get a retainer to keep your jaw in line, so I got this really awkward invisible-but-not-invisible retainer. So I've got all that going on, I'm heavily dependent on opioids, I'm not leaving the house, I'm becoming super sedentary, so I gained about 25 pounds over the course of maybe a year. I became super, super depressed.
I remember for a long period of time, every time I would go through a green light, just hoping that someone would run the red light and just end it, because I was living in 15-minute increments, and when you've already been told that you're a Pinto, I don't really want to see how this ends. It was just a very slow grind after that. At the time I just continued to plug away at whatever specialty the last specialist told me to go to and did what they said to do, but it just continued to get insidiously worse, without the ability to figure out where to go from there.
Dr. Stracks: It's interesting, the Pinto analogy. I don't think I've actually heard you tell me that before, you may have. In retrospect it's so limiting, right? You have this very small, very careful life you have to live, with all the accoutrements and the retainers. But I think you're right that at the time it must have felt really reassuring to have an explanation, maybe.
Matt: Yeah, and it was odd, because as I tell that story now, looking back, I'm like, well, that's probably not very good, it was terrible medical advice. But at the time it felt very compassionately delivered, because it was an hour-long appointment, so the doctor really listened to me and listened to my suffering and really empathized with it, and she had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, so there was an empathy level there. I had never been to an appointment where a doctor just listens to you for a long time. So whatever she said was going to be, okay, you're at least treating me like a human. You're also treating me like a bad car, but if you're willing to listen to me, I'll listen to you and do what you tell me. That is versus so much of the medical advice that I had received before that was really driven on diagnostics: quick in and out, here's what we're going to do, here's the procedures, here's the medication. So it was this weird confluence of probably terrible medical advice from a fear standpoint, but also, I think she was doing the very best that she could. It's just a medical model that was very backward.
Dr. Stracks: And how long do you think you had the symptoms before, and we're going to talk about how each of the three of you found out about mind-body medicine in a second, but how long do you think you lived like that before finding this model?
Matt: I'll answer the question in terms of the way we think about time and the way that I thought about it at the time. It was probably eight years of normal human calendars, but in my head it was eight eternities, because every 10 minutes took 10 years. To put it in concrete terms, and I know Brendan and I, and I believe Leah at some point, have talked about this: I hated my birthday, because my birthday represented to me, people would be excited about it, and I'd be like, okay, I'm 27 and there's a possibility that I might have to live until I'm 80, and you're celebrating that? I'm on mile two of this terrible marathon. So I think it was really eight years of normal time, but as anyone listening who's in chronic pain right now knows, that's a little misleading in terms of trying to quantify time.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, it's essentially forever, right?
How Brendan Discovered Mind-Body Medicine: Dr. Sarno and the Curable App
Dr. Stracks: All right, so I'm going to circle back to Brendan. What do you remember about finding out about this concept of mind-body medicine, and how that came about in the midst of this?
Brendan: Sure. Yeah, I was simply running out of options. I think my chronic pain progressively got worse over the course of maybe five or six years, and what I didn't mention was that the chronic pain in my ankle and swelling actually started to spread. It became lower leg pain, then leg pain, and then right-side body pain. It became very clear that, okay, this isn't just an ankle joint issue anymore, something more is going on here, and something significantly more debilitating as time went on and fewer options were left. We got to the point where the hospital system recommended a month-long pain program, and I had considered it. I had a family member who had gone through the program who had really tremendous results, so I was considering whether I was going to take a month off work. I was a pretty busy litigator, and it was going to be a pretty big commitment, so I was trying to figure out whether it was worth the commitment. I think pride was in the way. I didn't want to feel like this young 29-year-old should be going into a multidisciplinary program like this. What's going on?
I finally got to the point where it was so bad that I was considering this, and I watched the video, and during the video the doctor is talking about the relationship of the nervous system and pain, and how at times with people with chronic pain you can get this pain sensitization in your nervous system that starts feeding itself. That started to make me think a little differently about the physical origin of the pain. Like a lot of us do, I started googling, and really it was just "brain pain," "mind pain," that kind of thing. I actually ended up stumbling upon Dr. Sarno's book, The Mind Body Prescription. Curiosity got the best of me, and I found an Amazon page for that book. I'm analytical by nature, so I was very skeptical, but I just started scrolling through the comment sections, and if you've ever seen the comment sections on this book, it's outrageous. It's like 4.9 out of 5 stars on 10,000 reviews or whatever on Amazon. I'm like, this is bananas.
I remember people would give a synopsis of the book in the comment section, and this guy was laying out the argument. I think he described it as a portal opening up. I was in the middle of work, ignoring my work duties, doom-scrolling through this, and I see this comment and started reading it. I'm in just terrible, like 8 out of 10 pain, trying to get through the work day, hanging on by threads, very similar to what Matt was talking about, and I felt it budge. I felt a little budge in the pain, and I was like, that was weird. So I ordered the book and it came. I think it came on Halloween, I'll never forget. I read it, I just crushed it in an evening. My wife put the kids to bed and I'm crushing this book and finished it, and I remember waking up my wife at three in the morning: "I figured it out, this is it." I thought it was just going to be gone in a week, and Dr. Sarno makes it sound like it's just going to poof go away, and it didn't work out that way.
So I'm working on the book, I'm six weeks in, I feel it nudging, but I really don't feel a lot of progress. Finally I was on my iPhone and just started plugging into the App Store, like, there's got to be an app for this. I typed "Sarno app" and Curable comes up. I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool. Curable was pretty new at the time and had a handful of podcasts that have now grown into basically what we're doing here today. There was an episode of a young man named Aaron who had lower leg pain, and I listened to it, and I just remember it was like a gift from God. It was hearing his story, hearing his commitment to focusing on a mind-body connection to this very debilitating leg pain, and I just found a lot of similarities with my story. It gave me some hope. He just happened to mention, "Yeah, I worked with this doctor in Chicago, his name was Dr. Stracks." So I thought, I'm four and a half hours from Chicago, I should check out who this Dr. Stracks guy is, and here we are two years later.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, and just a couple of highlights of what you said. Ten years ago, if somebody was going to find out about this concept, it would have been only through Dr. Sarno's books. That was the only way to find it back then, and now a lot of people who are listening say, "I've never heard of Dr. Sarno," which is interesting. If people are listening and haven't heard of him, he was one of my mentors from New York City and was really the first to popularize this concept. I think we know a lot more now than he did then. I think he wrote that book about 25 years ago, but he was really the first person to get that information out. Also, in his books a lot of people read it as three sentences: "I read about this, I saw Dr. Sarno, and then I was better." A lot of people assume that's the model, and rarely does it work like that. So it's helpful to hear that you can read it and think, oh, this is it, and then still not know what to do or not know how to get better. And obviously Curable has been around for four or five years now and has sort of exploded the amount of information that's available about this concept, with more information coming out all the time.
How Leah Discovered Mind-Body Medicine and Dr. Stracks
Dr. Stracks: Leah, how did you happen to get involved in this area of medicine?
Leah: I'm laughing a little bit, because my first introduction to Dr. Sarno was very early on, probably about three months in. At that point I'm literally having headaches or a migraine all day, every day, so there's never been a break where I experience not being in excruciating pain. I was seeing an acupuncturist, going twice a week for three months, and he finally says, "I told you about The Mind Body Prescription," and I said no, what's that? He says, "It's about, you know, John Sarno wrote this book, we need to dig into your repressed anger, what are you really angry about?" I just remember being so furious. I was like, this isn't my fault, this doesn't have to do with me and my emotions, I am in physical pain, and I don't want to listen to you about this. I very much shut him off and didn't think about it again.
I probably bought the book on Amazon, started reading on my Kindle, and read the stories of people who read the book and were healed instantaneously, and thought it was a complete farce. In fact, it just made me more angry, because it felt like it really denied my experience. I shoved it away for two years. I was reintroduced to the idea when I had a second really big flare-up that led me back to the hospital. I was back in the chronic pain program, back living at home with my parents, back on disability, and it was a truly heartbreaking time. I'm 30 years old, or 29 actually at that time, and the little bit of progress that I had made, to be back at work part time and back living with my fiancé at the time in New York, everything exploded. I was in such excruciating pain and was back in this chronic pain program. I remember at the time I was also experiencing panic attacks very frequently with the pain.
I was working with a biofeedback therapist. If you're unfamiliar, they essentially hook you up to all these electrodes so that you can see your temperature, your cortisol level, your heart rate, and you work on breathing techniques to lower your body's physiological stress response. I remember being in there looking at these graphs, and as negative thoughts and emotions went through my body, I could see my cortisol levels shoot up, my temperature drop, my heart rate race, all these physiological symptoms. I was in a stress response, and it was the first time that it really all clicked together: the emotional experience I was having, the thoughts that were generating in my mind, were shifting and changing the pain I was experiencing. As we worked on some of the breathing techniques, I started to see some things change, and the graphs were helpful for me, because it was helpful to see, oh, cortisol's lowering, I feel two percent better, but that's two percent better than what I was feeling before. She had probably explained the relationship between the pain and the nervous system, but this was the first time I started to understand that these things are linked.
Simultaneously, in this program I was also working with a physical therapist. They were all aware in the program that I was really anxious at this time, having daily panic attacks, super anxious about how to just live from moment to moment because I was in so much pain and none of the medicines were helping. We're in Florida, which is a very liberal state of progressivism and alternative medicine, and the physical therapist leans over to me and says, "I don't mention this to everyone because most people aren't really open to these ideas, but I have this handout on this thing called TMS, and there's this idea that some of the emotions and pain in our body can cause physiological changes that then induce pain." I started reading, and differently than when this was mentioned to me two years ago, similar to what you were saying, Brendan, I had lost hope. There wasn't really any other hope of what to do. The doctors had done all the medications, I had tried all of the different alternative therapies that were still physiologically based, and nothing had budged.
That was my first real introduction to it. I started to read the handout and thought the idea was interesting enough, but I was in such a state of emergency that it wasn't tenable for me to work on it in that moment. I think that's helpful for me in retrospect to think about: there are times when the work I've had to do in TMS, in my body, I needed to be in a space that was not in that level of emergency. The idea was interesting, but I just didn't have the capacity to do a lot of the things yet. It took a couple more months of me still really relying on the Western medical model and pain pills and things like that, and then slowly inching my way into this model. I very much found Curable through a Google search of "migraines chronic pain TMS, what do I do," because I still was skeptical of some of John Sarno's approach and the very quick healing that was happening. I started listening to the Curable app and podcast and heard one of the hosts who had migraines which dissipated and completely went away. That was the first time I'd heard of anyone's migraines ever going away, and that was unbelievable to me. Of course I created a narrative of how hers weren't as bad as mine and there's no way that would happen, but I was curious enough. And then I listened to the interview with Dr. Stracks. I believe in your story, Dr. Stracks, you've also experienced migraines?
Dr. Stracks: I did. Migraines are sort of in my family; my mom sort of gets migraines. Being a good soldier, I wanted to be part of the family too, so I would get them. The worst migraine I ever had, I actually still remember it, was August 8th, 1988. It was the night of the first night game at Wrigley Field, and I was trying to qualify for the U.S. Amateur golf tournament. I made a double bogey on the 34th hole and missed qualifying by two shots. I don't even know if you guys were alive in 1988, but it was the hottest summer ever in the history of certainly Chicago, if not the world. It's 98 degrees that entire day, and I remember on the golf course looking around, no trees within hundreds of yards, and having this thought, this was 32 years ago, that this is the hottest I will ever be in my life, and to this day that was the hottest it'll ever be. Anyway, I made double bogey on the 34th hole, I missed qualifying by two shots, and then the thunder rolled in and the game got rained out that night. I was kind of scared of thunderstorms, this perfect storm. I have this memory of my mom driving me back home, and my friend who had caddied for me, and I screamed the entire ride home because I was in so much pain, just hoping that my skull would explode. That was not the typical experience for me, but certainly I've had that, not lately.
Leah: So there's something in your story, or maybe something even from the Curable co-host, that drew me to Dr. Stracks. At that time, in the summer, I told myself I wasn't going to see any more doctors. I had driven up and down the United States seeing doctors. My life had become solely focused on health and doctors and appointments and medications and therapies, and I told myself I didn't want to do any more. So I remember calling Dr. Stracks's office very skeptical, telling the receptionist about all of my skepticism, how I didn't really want to do this but was sort of curious about Dr. Stracks, and he had helped these people with their migraines. She said, "I had migraines, and Dr. Stracks helped cure me of my migraines," and I was like, yeah, okay. You're in Chicago, my siblings are in Chicago, I guess we could do a telehealth appointment. I was like, all right, and that was the start.
Our first appointment was the first time that I really felt truly heard around my pain, and I was told there was a possibility for healing. There was hope, and that was huge for me, because that wasn't ever spoken of in any of my appointments with doctors. It was a very dim and dark future, and I don't blame them, because they were working with the knowledge that they had at the time. But through Dr. Stracks, I think you told me to watch a video you have on your website, a two-hour video about the science behind mind-body medicine, and that really kicked off a lot of my interest. Knowing that there's hope, there's someone who could help me lead through this process, and the amount of research and science that isn't necessarily widespread or understood by doctors today or used, but it's out there, that really supported these ideas.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, and I remember when you and I met for the first time, I remember you talking about how it felt dangerous to have hope, that you had been to see so many different physicians and started down so many different roads. I hear this from people all the time. So many people come to me after years and years of pain and different types of treatments, and sort of getting started in one direction and finding out that it's not helpful, so it's hard for people to enter into one more new space and wonder what's going to be different this time than all the other times. But I remember that.
How Matt Found Mind-Body Medicine: Evidence-Based Pain Neuroscience
Dr. Stracks: Matt, how did you enter into this and find out about this world of medicine?
Matt: Yeah. During those eight years that I was wandering around in pain, I tried basically everything, and that involved a lot of experimenting outside of the medical model while still plugging away, super Type A, within the medical model. My first experience with what I thought at the time was mind-body medicine was that someone recommended I see a naturopathic doctor, and I did. She was really about infusions and expensive vitamins, and I got the feeling she was a little bit crazy. Her office was in her house, she had a dog, and she told me that she thought her dog was the reincarnation of her mother. I'm not one to judge, but I remember thinking at the time, because she left the room and it was just me and the dog, am I supposed to address the dog as a dog or as a human? I say that story to say I had had some experiences, and I'm an attorney, an analytical individual by nature, so I felt like I was being taken advantage of when I was there. She told me, take these medicines, do this infusion, do this other thing, and I walked out with a $500 bill, and I just felt like this is not legitimate. For a while that steered me away from mind-body medicine, because there are so many different words for so many different things, and it's hard to know which things are evidence-based and which are not. For a long time I kept a very guarded approach to anything that I felt wasn't super scientific.
My next positive experience with mind-body medicine was that I did a 30-day chronic pain outpatient program through the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. I feel like it was a great gateway drug for me into mind-body medicine. It was very focused on managing pain, and I would say it was very far downstream compared to Dr. Stracks's program, meaning they were focused on stressors in the moment, which was great because I had no experience with how to handle stressors in the moment, so at the time it was super helpful. It basically laid the groundwork that how you experience the world around you affects your pain. But it was also very focused on managing your pain and making it easier to live out the remainder of your days, which was an idea that I didn't embrace. It was also a very time-limited program, so you do it for 30 days and then you go home. But that was the first time I had an experience with mind-body medicine where I felt like there's a lot here, because I recovered infinitely more from the 30 days that I spent at that outpatient clinic than I did in the whole of my interventionally driven pain journey. I think that set the stage and planted the roots for eventually finding Dr. Stracks, and Leah and Brendan, and what we've built together.
What really drew me to Dr. Stracks's program was, again, listening to the Curable podcast. I remember listening to several of the interviews with Dr. Tor Wager and Dr. Alan Gordon, people doing what I perceived to be extremely strong evidence-based work, and the logic of neuroplasticity. I did a deep dive, and it made so much sense to me from an analytical standpoint that I was able to fully trust it. Then through that podcast I connected with Dr. Stracks, and just to toot his horn for a second, I think what really helped me was holding two things at the same time: knowing all the evidence-based work behind the neuroplasticity of pain and modern pain neuroscience, and also Dr. Stracks's approach, which is very much "meet me where I was at that time," which I feel is a rare quality in a doctor. When I met with Dr. Stracks and we talked about a game plan moving forward, I felt very safe in terms of not being taken advantage of. I'm sure a lot of people listening know there are very few things more vulnerable and more terrible than being in a lot of pain and going down this route, and also trying to decide in your head whether the person that's helping you is incentivized by a genuine, evidence-based desire to help, or a genuine desire to help that's not evidence-based, or whether it's literally not a genuine desire to help. All of those things brought together provided the ecosystem for me to feel comfortable moving forward.
Starting Individual Care and Forming a Mind-Body Medicine Group
Dr. Stracks: And serendipitously, this was all going on literally at the same time. I met you all right around, I think it was late summer or fall of 2018. I had been in my own practice for about a year. I want to spend some time talking about how you made this pivot and got started and what's gone on since then. My memory of it is that Brendan and Matt, I saw you both in my office in the north suburbs of Chicago, and Leah, you and I had a telehealth appointment. My memory is that we were heading into the holidays, and I do some classes similar to the Curable groups, but I didn't have anything planned because of the holidays, and everybody's going to holiday parties, back when holiday parties were a thing, pre-COVID. But the three of you had similar enough stories and similar enough personalities that I think I said, I'm just going to create an opportunity to have you guys talk. I think all three of you were there, though I may have that detail wrong. Then my regular classes started in January. What do you remember about getting started with that, either seeing me or getting started in the groups and discussions, and how that started to evolve? Brendan, I'll come back to you and start there.
Brendan: Sure. I'll start with the appointment. At that point I was ready for some hope, so I think it sounds a little different from how Leah and Matt might have gone into that first appointment with you. I was at the end of my rope, and I felt like I had been working on it long enough that I knew, and it was an intuitive thing, I just had this feeling that this has to be it. So I went in with a lot of hope. Still being Type A and analytical, I came in with my four-page history and my own thoughts and all the research that I had done. It's outrageous; I actually found it for this, and I'm not going to share it, but it's embarrassing how ridiculous it was. I remember you honored it. You looked at it and read the whole thing, and you mentioned a few things during our appointment that led me to believe that you had read it and taken it seriously. But you were just very confident: listen, I'm pretty sure you have TMS, and you will get better, and here's what we need to do, X, Y, and Z. It was really a breath of fresh air.
As Leah and Matt have talked about with other healthcare providers, that's how I felt. I remember at one point I was so frustrated being shuttled between physicians and doctors, and here's someone that's actually taking the time to listen and asking questions: how's your stress level, what's work like for you, what's going on at home, you've got two young kids. It just felt like a more human interaction, and on top of the fact that I had done enough homework on this and enough inner work, I felt like intuitively this is somewhere I wanted to go. That was really helpful.
As far as that first group session, I will say I was still very self-conscious about the fact that this is a mind-body issue. I think Leah mentioned, "this isn't my fault." I had some very significant concerns about what I was getting into. Am I crazy? Are the people that are going to be in this group quacks? I just remember meeting Matt and Leah for the first time during that call and thinking to myself, holy smokes, these people are very similar to me, and impressive, and they just seem like awesome people and not crazy. It was a little bit of validation: if they're going through something similar and they found this route, maybe this isn't insane, because I still had those questions. Even the founders of the Curable app, I'd listened to their own stories, to the extent they were willing to share. I think the person who moderates, Laura, I think, went to the same college that I went to, and I have a high respect for the folks that I went to college with, so it just felt like, okay, this is a community that isn't just crazy, it's evidence-based. That first meeting with you and Matt and Leah set me on the path of, okay, I can just take it easy and recognize that this is a place where I should actually spend my time investigating, because it isn't a fool's errand.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah. I always close the classes in the last week by having people go around and say something that they learned over the course of the class. In this last one before the holidays, one of my patients, also about your age, said some version of that. She's had this pain for a long time, and she thinks of herself oftentimes as sort of sickly and weak and ill, and she said, "I was part of this group, and all these people are just total badasses," and finally she said, "at some point I realized if I'm with them, then I'm a badass too, I'm not sickly." I've been hearing that more and more from people: this is a community of people who are doing amazing things with amazing strength. Leah, how about you? What do you remember about getting involved, either seeing me initially or starting to get involved in some of the groups and classes?
Leah: I remember from our first appointment I left with a handout on how to approach my migraines differently, and similar to what Brendan and Matt have said, one thing that really struck me from my first appointment with Dr. Stracks was this idea of truly being listened to and heard, and my whole self, not just my physical symptoms. It truly mattered what was going on in my life, what my emotions were, what my thoughts were, what my family life was like. That had never really happened before without it being, "What was the weather like? When you're migrating, maybe there was a barometric pressure," that sort of interest in other things that were happening. But that was the first time that I truly felt very heard about my story and who I was as a person, because at that point, multiple years into a chronic pain story, I felt like I'd lost who I was. My identity had become my pain, and so now being able to unpack some of those things I'd been carrying was helpful.
I know one of the most helpful things early on was when you put me in contact with some of your patients, and I talked to two other women. One of them, I believe, is Jill Rydell, who's been on Hope for Healing. I remember having such an incredible conversation with her. She's had migraines for 40 years and had been on tons of medications. I remember this one part of the conversation, when I was still very skeptical and telling her about my skepticism. She said, "Look, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, right? You've done lots of things that haven't worked. But even if it doesn't work, you'll learn more about yourself by the end of the process." That just really hooked me. There was her story of hope, which I wanted to believe in despite my own resistance to it, but then this idea that it wasn't going to hurt me. I'd taken medications which had caused terrible side effects, I'd been in hospitals where it's isolating, but it wasn't going to hurt me to try this. After talking with those two patients, my sense of possibility was really buoyed.
Joining the groups early on, I just remember stepping back, looking, and saying, oh, you too, you too. A real big thing for me is just how isolating chronic pain is, especially as a young person. It is not a story people talk about. Pain isn't something my friends talked about. My friends are at the top of their careers right now, getting married and having kids, and my life looked so different. To look across a screen in these groups and have people say, "Hey, yeah, me too," and it might have looked different, they had different symptoms and different places where they had pain, but there were these parallels in our stories and journeys that immediately spoke to me. We went through many different topics, like mindfulness and compassion and journaling, and all of those were really fascinating and interesting to me, and we'll happily talk later about those different modalities. But early on the thing that really stuck out to me was the sense of community with other people, and that it wasn't a community of people here to commiserate, like "man, this sucks." It was people saying, "This is hard, and here I am pushing forward, and here's this thing that actually worked for me, or here's a shift that I've seen." That was the type of encouragement I needed, because at the time no one understood my experience. I couldn't talk to my close friends about it, I couldn't talk to my husband about it in the same way, or my family, because no one had experienced it before.
Finally, it was just this huge breath of fresh air to talk to people who understood. Oh, no, I understand how hard it is to get up and go to work every day when 90 percent of your brain is only thinking about how do I move from moment to moment because I'm in so much pain, and how do I balance trying some of these new techniques with the pressure I feel to be better from the people around me or to live up to different standards within society. Those initial calls were really helpful, and then sort of meeting some people that, I don't know how else to say it, my heart felt like these were going to be my people. Dr. Stracks was obviously behind the scenes making some magic happen in these groups, but on a soul level, knowing we have similar stories but also similar ways of moving through the world, we started to form some bonds of friendship and a willingness to take a risk of being vulnerable and sharing parts of myself with them.
Dr. Stracks: And Matt, how about you? Obviously you were there too, and sort of this time frame was your time frame also. What do you remember about getting started with this?
Matt: Before I got started, I was actually sort of hesitant about the group component. There was a group component to the interdisciplinary clinic that I had been in here in Chicago. That clinic had a workers' comp model to a certain degree, so a lot of people there were incentivized to be there in order to continue on their workers' comp program, which led to a lot of negativity in the room, and I absorbed people's negativity. I had this same experience when my wife and I went to a support group for chronic pain in my local town, and it just felt very negative. Not in the sense that these were negative people, but in the sense that everyone was drowning and trying to reach out to see if anyone else knew how to swim, and no one knew how to swim, so we were all just screaming. There were also a lot of older people screaming, and I wasn't old, and that hurt my feelings. It made me feel sad. I thought, oh man, if they're feeling this miserable when they're 67 or 77, and I'm 27 or whatever it was, this is not good. So I had a lot of negative connotations about groups and group connection related to pain. Also through social media: I tried Facebook groups and found those very unhelpful for all the same reasons, just an additional platform with so many people, I don't know any of them, they all seem super negative, and everyone's trying this CBD oil or that. It almost exacerbated my fear.
So I was not super thrilled about the group component, but I was also very open, based on the trust that Dr. Stracks had built when I first met with him. A couple of things jumped out right away. I immediately recognized this as something totally different. Dr. Stracks had boundary-driven rules out of the gate, about not giving advice to other people, which I really appreciated because we had tried enough advice, that wasn't the issue, and that everything was confidential. Also, there were a lot of young people, which was really important for me. For some people it might not be important, but these were people who could feel pain but could also feel the extreme loneliness of being in your 20s or 30s going through it, and I really appreciated that. The other thing that jumped out to me was that I expected to join the groups and get a lot of information that was super helpful, and I did. Dr. Stracks provided a lot of information, and each week had a different theme. But sometimes it's overwhelming when someone asks about TMS, because the themes are ones that are sort of saturated and popular in culture, like gratitude and positive self-talk, and not to diminish those things. What I came away with from our group was less the information and more all these motivated people that Dr. Stracks had connected in a boundary-driven environment.
I guess the last thing I'll say is it always reminded me, I'm from Indianapolis, so Brad Stevens is lore in the area, and he always has this quote about groups. He talks about how the key to successful teams or successful groups is that at the end of every night, everyone leaves the building heading in the same direction. What I mean by that is not that we all agreed on everything or our experiences were all the same, but everyone came to those groups every Wednesday with the same motivation and speaking the same language. I think that was super helpful for me, that we weren't trying to decipher what each other was talking about, because Dr. Stracks created an environment where everyone felt comfortable to speak the same language and celebrate each other's victories without dragging each other down.
Dr. Stracks: And for those of you listening who don't know who Brad Stevens is, he is currently the basketball coach of the Boston Celtics in the National Basketball Association, previously the basketball coach at Butler University in Indianapolis when they went to the final game of the NCAA championship two years in a row. Matt, it's funny too, thinking about the rules and guidelines for the group and how important that was, because those are the only two rules and guidelines, which makes me think that in some of these other groups maybe there aren't any rules and guidelines. But it's amazing how just those two, "this stays here" and "don't give anybody else advice," I've been doing this for a long time, and if we put those two guidelines in place, it really does raise the safety level.
Matt: I think, Dr. Stracks, there might be a third implicit rule that I think is really important. I guess it's less of a rule and more of a culture: everyone came to the group with the intention of exploring pain from a different way. You didn't have to necessarily express that, and in fact you encouraged people to find that at their own pace, but I think that was something I had never found before in any other group I had gone to. It was like, "What's your secret? How often do you take showers?" and that just gets super exhausting, versus a culture of "we're going to work on personality issues and things that may have happened previously in your lifetime."
Two Years Later: Progress, Milestones, and Setbacks in Chronic Pain Recovery
Dr. Stracks: Yeah. So this was early 2019, a couple of years ago obviously, and there's been a long time between then and now, so we're not going to talk about everything that's happened in between. But for those listening, spoiler alert: everybody is doing better now than they were then. A little different from some of the guests who come on Hope for Healing, none of the three of you would I say is "cured" in that sense. Each of you is at various parts of your own journey, generally doing well, having some setbacks and struggles here and there. That's one of the reasons I invited the three of you on, because a lot of times people will hear, maybe Leah, you talked about reading Dr. Sarno's book, and everybody's magically cured in two sentences, that's all it takes. Then I've had other people say to me even this week that if they hear one more person say they're magically cured, they're going to throw the whole concept out the window. So what I want to do is spend a little bit of time now thinking about some of the things you've done over this intervening time frame, and talk a little bit about where you are now, especially compared to where you were then, which I would say is amazing for all three of you, even if none of you feels like you're somebody who says, "Yes, I had chronic pain, I don't have it anymore." Let's talk about some of the things that have been important and some of the milestones on the journey. Brendan, when you think about these couple of years, both in terms of what's improved and what some of the sticking points have been, but also some of the things that have been helpful, in addition to having made the decision that we would continue the group in that format over that time period?
Brendan: Sure. Well, I'll start with what's improved, and I won't bury the lead: my pain is significantly better. I went from a place of being pretty much chronically disabled, and, as I mentioned before, on days having trouble walking a few blocks. My church is a few blocks from here, and I have specific memories of having to drive to church, which is two blocks away, with my family because I just couldn't make it. Thankfully that's all in the rearview mirror. The last two years have been tremendous. It didn't happen magically, and all three people on this call would attest to that. It's been a lot of work and a lot of fits and starts and ups and downs. But today my life looks extraordinarily different, and I'll just stick with the physical for now, than it did two years ago. I'm basically back to all the old activities that I like to do. Actually, not basically, I am doing them. I'm back to playing sports and running and cycling and wrestling with my kids, all these things that I couldn't do two years ago. The pain isn't 100 percent gone, it will creep back, but it's a shell of its former self.
I think a big difference in the last two years is that my relationship to the pain has completely shifted. Two years ago it felt like something completely outside of my control, and now I can view it from a different perspective. When I feel these creeps of pain, and it usually manifests itself in tightness for me, a kind of tension pain, I check in with myself and am a bit more mindful: okay, my body's telling me something, why am I feeling this tension, why am I feeling this back pain, this leg pain, shoulder pain, headache, whatever it is. That's where I start now. It used to be, oh man, I need to go get my ice out, I need to pop some Advil or something like that, take a rest, elevate my leg. Now it's, hey, what's going on in my life? You talk about what happened 24 hours ago, what's happening now, and what's happening 24 hours from now, and I think about that a lot: what's happening in my life, some of the things that maybe I'm not recognizing. More often than not I can realize, sometimes it's hard to find out exactly what it is, but I can tell I'm holding on to something, and that's causing this emotional tension which is manifesting itself in pain. That's something I'm still dealing with, but the relationship has been completely different.
As far as things that have helped, from a 5,000-foot overview, the way I put it is it's just been a journey of self-exploration: who I am, personality traits, as Dr. Sarno would put it. I would identify as Type A, a perfectionist, a do-gooder, all these things. Learning about those things, and maybe there's a reason for them. Why do I feel like I need to exercise so much control over my life? Why do I need to feel like this do-gooder? Maybe I should respect my own feelings and boundaries a little bit more. That's been an important transformation for me, and something I just want to plug Curable for. One of the things I took away from Curable is the introduction to mindfulness meditation, which has been a huge addition to my life, and it's something I now practice daily. That practice has evolved over the last couple of years, but it's what I call the armor I put on in the morning. I meditate for 20 or 30 minutes and it sets me up for the day, and I've started to notice that if I don't armor up and meditate and start my day from a place of spaciousness and clarity, I can get kind of lost. Journaling, we've talked about. Self-compassion practice is something I'm just now finally allowing myself to get into. It took a couple of years; it felt too cheesy, frankly, but I think there's an aversion to it because I'm pretty self-critical, and so that's somewhere I'm focusing.
I think we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but I can't overstate how important the group has been, in the formal setting with many others who are not on the call today who have been instrumental as well. I want to make sure they understand how important they've been in this healing journey. But Matt, Leah, and I have been together for two years, and having them as teammates and watching them go through wins and losses and struggles has been a huge benefit, to go through this journey with them, to learn from them, and to act as scaffolding for each other when we might want to kick the can and give up on this mindfulness stuff or mind-body connection. That's kind of how I leave it for now.
Self-Compassion as a Required Part of Healing Chronic Pain
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, thank you. It's interesting what you said about self-compassion and just getting started with it, because what I said recently in your guys' group, and what I've been saying a lot to people, is that the more I learn about this, the more I think that self-compassion is actually a required component of healing. The words I've been using are that we can be overly hard on ourselves or we can feel better, but we can't do both. It's a non-negotiable part of getting better. I've been studying cognitive therapy over the last year, sort of my side COVID project, and the more I delve into that, the more insight I get into what people are telling themselves in their minds. If you had told me two years ago how unkind people can be to themselves, even coming from somebody who over time has been unkind to himself, I would not have believed what people are telling themselves on a regular basis. At this point I don't think that we can continue with that and feel better. I was talking to a patient earlier this week about what she was telling herself in her mind, and she said, "I know the pain is fight or flight, but I don't understand where the fight-or-flight is coming from." It's coming from you constantly, constantly, constantly being down on yourself. It's one of the topics that in my mind is no longer negotiable. It has to be taken care of as people heal.
Brendan: Just one thing I'd like to add before we move on with the self-compassion piece. At least for me, a big hesitation I had was that it's going to take away this drive, this is why I've succeeded to the extent that I have, whatever my goals are, this is what helps me achieve them. It's been a recognition that actually this is getting in the way of a lot of these things. Being overly self-critical gets in the way, and starting from a place of self-compassion and doing things for the right reasons is ultimately going to help. As Matt talked about, how important science-based facts are, it's coming out in the literature now that if you're starting from a place of self-compassion and not self-loathing or self-criticism, you're actually going to achieve your goals, whatever those are, much more quickly and efficiently.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, and the goals and the high achievement I think is fine. I found a definition of perfectionism recently that said there's nothing wrong with having high standards. High standards are good, and clearly there are a lot of high-achieving people who come to see me and are listening to you guys talk. But the problem with being perfectionistic or self-critical is this hostility that comes in when we don't meet those goals, especially if those goals are impossibly high. The standards and the achievement are fine, but we can't be uber-critical of ourselves when we're not meeting them. That, as you said, Brendan, takes away from people's ability to get there. Leah, how about you? What are some of the highlights and milestones that you've seen over the couple of years as you've been able to get that headache to really calm down and sometimes go away, in a way that I would say probably it didn't for a long time?
Leah: From Daily Migraines to Headache-Free Days
Leah: I don't remember, until fairly recently, having headache-free days. I remember talking with you even this summer and saying, I don't know what it feels like to not have a headache, but I've lost that memory. I can very proudly say now that most days I don't have a headache, which is incredible. They're not completely gone. They come, and I kind of have one right now, probably because I'm a little nervous about this conversation, but it doesn't scare me. Like you were saying, Brendan, my relationship to the sensations in my body has changed a lot. I remember there was an episode of Curable that came out in the spring where they interviewed a woman who worked with the Pain Psychology Center and now works for UnitedHealthcare, with her top five things she says about coming out of chronic pain. One of the ones she said was, you won't know the moment that you come out of chronic pain. I was surprised: how is that possible? I've been living this for four years, I'll absolutely know the moment I'm not in chronic pain. Then I finally understood, because it's top of mind. I'm always going to think about it, because it was constantly on my mind, and therefore I wasn't able to let it down. I don't have an answer to how that happens, besides that slowly that fear response starts to soften as I've done different work and started to change my relationship to it. I now don't experience headaches most days. I used to wake up every morning and judge what my day was going to be like based on the sensations and headache I had. It was the first thought of waking every day, and it is not the first thought I have every day anymore. That's a really tangible difference.
I work full time now, which was not something I was doing previously. I was working part time and very much considered myself, like you were saying, Brendan, disabled. I interviewed and applied for a brand-new job within the education field, which was never something that I thought would have been possible. I had curated a life that was going to be very small and different based on what I thought my limitations were. And travel, and going places that are loud, that's something I kind of have to remind myself of. When I go to a concert, I'm like, I'm at a concert right now. Not really in COVID times, but I went to a concert last spring and my friend looked over at me and was like, "We're at a concert," and I was like, oh yeah, we're at a concert. I go out to eat at places and it's not a thing that I think of, how loud will the place be.
In terms of things that are still in my toolkit that really make a difference to me, journaling was a huge one. I still journal most days, and have tried the John Sarno or the Nicole Sachs journal speak, 30 minutes or 20 minutes every day. I did that for a good chunk of time, and I don't do it the same prescription of 20 minutes every day, but it is a tool that I now use to help me process when the pain is flaring up. Oftentimes now I know it's because I'm angry about something or really frustrated about something. Anger and frustration weren't emotions that I was able to tap into as a kid. Other people were allowed to feel angry in my family, but that was not an emotion that I was able to have, and that really got transferred into my headaches being an acceptable expression of my anger. So journaling has been really helpful. Similar to Brendan, my mindfulness and meditation practice has been really helpful in being more aware of my emotions and my thoughts and the ways they might be triggering physical sensations and pain. The first step for me is to notice that it's happening in order to react differently. I've spent 30-plus years acting in one way, so I at least have to first notice in order to make a shift and do something different, because those habits and reflexes are so ingrained, very rightfully so, to keep myself surviving and safe through my childhood and adolescence.
With the mindfulness practice, and I feel like we're all on the self-compassion kick right now, I know that is where my work is right now: really starting to strengthen the voice in my mind that is the positive, optimistic, affirming voice that is there. I definitely think most of the things that I say to myself would be the most atrocious things I could possibly say to someone else, and they are just constantly going on repeat. I identify as being perfectionistic and pretty self-critical, and so really starting to notice that voice is also scary, right? I have this voice that is chronically super mean to myself, but that noticing is my first opportunity to shift. So I've been really working on beefing up that muscle, as Dr. Stracks told me, these are muscles that I can build. It's not a binary, you either have it or you don't, it's just something I have to practice and build up.
And finally, our group. We joke around that we're getting our tank filled, like we're going to the gas station and getting our tank filled. It's the gasoline and fuel that keeps me going. Matt and Brendan have just been incredible friends and supports, but also, like Brendan was saying, we have a whole group of incredible people on this healing journey with us, led fearlessly by Dr. Stracks, and every time we meet each month it's getting my tank fueled to keep pushing ahead in this healing journey.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, thanks. I want to talk some about the group and the group dynamic in a few minutes. It's interesting, echoing the self-compassion: I was talking to somebody else in the group yesterday, and we were talking about the mean things that we say to ourselves, and she said, "Is that not how it works in your head, Dr. Stracks? Not anymore?" We're trying to tease that out, because at one point I was just as critical to myself as everybody else was, and it's sort of been falling away over the past seven or eight years. I have some specific memories. I took a couple-years-long training in body-centered psychotherapy and sat in the therapist role, the client role, and the demo role. I have a specific memory of being the demo person for strong emotions in this training. I'm not a strong-emotion guy for the most part, and it was my job in that moment, with 30 people watching, to sit in front of the room and let the therapist show how to elicit strong emotions from people. We were working on this idea that for a long, long time, if I did something wrong, immediately I'd be like, wow, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I am so stupid. He elicited that out of me in the midst of this big group, a pretty vulnerable place, but something shifted after that. Shortly after, I started noticing that I would say to myself, "Are you so stupid?" and be like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait. We don't use that language anymore, we don't talk like that around here anymore. It started to click in and that started to be the rule in my own mind. I've thought a lot about how to transfer that experience, and what you guys are saying, Leah, and you said it really eloquently, is that it's not a switch. You start to put it into place, and the first thing is to recognize what we're saying, and then to start to say some version of "this is not the only option of how to talk to ourselves, and let's figure out some other options."
Leah: Yeah, and I just want to say one quick thing about that. When we talked about happiness and positive emotions being a muscle that I could build, and that compassion voice, that idea seems pretty simple, right? You're like, I'll just say positive things to myself and tap into that. The truth is it's actually been some of the hardest work that I've done, and then I have to give myself grace for it. It's been 32 years where I've lived in a pretty critical household that is pretty worried and anxiety prone, and I've had 32 years of internalizing a lot of voices that are very critical. That's been a lot of my compassion for myself recently, like, wow, this is really hard. But I also know that it's possible, the same way I know my physical healing is possible, that changing that voice is possible, but giving myself grace that the healing process takes time.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah. That critical voice that so many of us had forms for very important reasons, whether it's fitting in with the family or protecting ourselves from other people's critical voices. Oftentimes it's essential for the growing-up process, just to survive and thrive in a lot of families. That's one of the things I highlight when I'm talking with people about this: it's not there just to make our lives miserable, like the symptoms, the physical symptoms. Oftentimes it's there to help us figure out how to move forward in the world in some kind of meaningful way. That's why it's so time-consuming and challenging to let that voice go, because it's played a super important role for so many people over time. Matt, how about you? Some of the things that have been helpful over these couple of years, and a little bit about where you are now as well?
Matt: Movement, Triathlon Training, and Healing Beyond Chronic Pain
Matt: Yeah, I'm very good. I feel very grateful. I was just thinking it's very overwhelming to describe how I am, because I'm so different. I still have some chronic pain, but I'm back to doing everything that I ever wanted to do, which is an absolutely crazy thing to say given the lowest of the low points. I have two children, and there's not a week that goes by, my wife's really the one that notices it more, that she says, "Oh, you just carried a heavy couch," or little things. And there are big things too. I'm someone that needs goals, so having those victories to look back on when I have bumps in the road is helpful. One thing that's been really helpful for me is movement. I'm not a very good meditator. I don't feel super safe sitting still, and I'm not good at sitting still, and part of this journey is realizing what's good for me. So much of medicine is other people telling you what's good for you, and I think what Dr. Stracks is really good at, and what having a group to witness what other people are doing does, is developing the confidence that I don't have to do what Brendan's doing, or maybe that is something I want to explore. For me, for the longest time, I did an eight-week MBSR class, I did a 30-day pain program that focused heavily on meditation, and it wasn't that I wasn't good at it, it just wasn't helpful. I felt very frozen every time I did it. One thing that I've really explored and that has really helped my healing is embracing the fact that movement, through yoga or as a big cyclist, opens the door to healing in ways I never thought were possible. The summer I did an Ironman, which was something I never thought I would be able to do, and having those victories, whether it's a small thing like carrying a couch or a big goal I'm reaching for, makes it so much easier for me. I actually have a little notebook where I cut out and paste a picture of some victory, so that if I do run into a period where things are hard, I can go back and visually tap into what's going really well over the long haul.
I guess this dovetails into maybe one of the upcoming categories about community. I've used this example before when I'm talking to people about Brendan and Leah and my relationship and other people in our group and with Dr. Stracks. I'm lucky that my parents live relatively close to our house, and my wife's mother lives close to our house, so they have a lot of exposure to our two children. They see them, COVID aside, maybe once a week or once every two weeks, and they're always like, "Oh, my daughter's name is Jenny, Jenny looks so much older, or she's doing this thing that she didn't used to do," and in my head I'm like, you saw her six days ago, she is literally exactly the same, because I'm so close to her that I don't notice the changes. One thing that has really helped me is that, as close as Brendan and Leah and I are, we're different humans, so I see things. I'm going to pick on Leah. A couple of weeks ago, we have our own separate text chain and also a separate Zoom call that we do without a moderator, and Leah was just super nonchalantly like, "Yeah, I'm doing pretty well, I'm just not having headaches anymore," and Brendan and I were like, shut the front door, what are you talking about, you don't have headaches anymore? I think it's hard when it's yourself to see the progress, just like for a grandparent who can see progress because they're a little further back. That has been really helpful to me, to have that perspective of: I may be going through a tough week, but Brendan just crushed some goal, or Leah is getting ready to make a big move or something like that, and I can hang in there. That's versus when I left the clinic in Chicago, which was a tremendous clinic, but when you're done, you're done, and when you go through tough times, you're on your own.
The last thing I'll mention that has been really helpful for me is that I think TMS, or mind-body medicine, has launched all three of us, I think we would all agree, into areas to learn more that are adjacent to mind-body medicine. For instance, learning more about loneliness and its impact and finding authors who research that, and having a backdrop of mind-body medicine in which to frame it. Whether it's trauma-informed movement or loneliness or all these different things, there are all these wonderful experts out there, and I think in the field of wellness people get so dogmatic. One thing that Dr. Stracks is phenomenal at is avoiding that "there's one right way to heal." That has really allowed all three of us to explore, when it's right for us, different experts who wouldn't necessarily identify themselves as even 100 percent agreeing with our path to healing, but who have a wealth of information. I can just speak for myself that it has really helped me heal by continuing to learn from people even if they may be in a slightly different field or area of expertise.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah. Leah, Brendan, I know you guys want to chime in. Matt, I just want to say one thing about skipping over important details. Somehow I missed the Ironman detail over the summer. I had in my mind that you had done a triathlon, sort of an Olympic triathlon, but I just want to double-check: you ran a marathon after a hundred-mile bike ride after a two-mile swim? It was an Ironman?
Matt: I did a 70.3, so it was a mile-and-a-quarter or so swim, then a 60-mile ride, and then the half marathon. It was also, I'm a fairly introverted person, so it was the most introverted thing ever, because it was during COVID so the actual Ironmans were closed. I developed a route throughout our city and just did it on my own, which is the perfect introvert way to do an Ironman.
Dr. Stracks: It's amazing. Leah, you have some thoughts?
Finding Your Own Healing Path: Intuition, Agency, and Individualized Mind-Body Medicine
Leah: I just wanted to echo Matt's point around finding your own healing path. There are so many tools and techniques within the mind-body medicine world and within the wellness industry at large, and I think one thing that was hard for me at the beginning was that I really wanted a specific prescription. I wanted Dr. Stracks to say, "Do this each day," because very much that's what I was being told by other doctors previously. They'd say, take these pills, or you need to do this injection, or do this physical therapy this many times a week. As well-intentioned as those pieces of medical advice might have been, it also took away a lot of my sense of agency and power, as a woman and as an individual. That's been a hard thing to garner back, because I so desperately wanted to be out of pain that I would cede all of my authority to someone else to know, and along the way I had lost an intuition of what I know I need in this moment. I know there are many different people within the TMS world, some with more prescriptive programs, and I would just encourage you to try it and see what makes sense for you and what works for you. I remember doing body scan meditations and I thought they were the worst thing ever. Everyone says that's one way to get more comfortable with your body, and I hated them, because I was like, why would I want to be in my body more? I wanted to dissociate as much as possible. But now, as I'm getting more comfortable, it's something I'm accessing a little bit more, because it makes sense for me right now. So it's just an encouragement I'd like to give: I imagine you might not think you know what you need, but you probably do at some sense have an inkling, and start trusting that inkling of where to move towards in your healing journey, and what would make sense for you right now, which might not be what made sense for you six months ago or even a month ago. At least for me it's been really incredible to start tapping back into that sense of knowing what I need, with a caveat, which is that it's very hard, because my first instinct is to ask someone else what I should do.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah, absolutely, and I say that to people regularly. It's part of why I like this work, because it's so individualized for people, but it is a little different oftentimes from "do these 11 things and feel better," which I think is what I would prefer to be able to say to people. As you say, Leah, everybody's pathway is still a little bit different. I encourage people to trust their intuition and to bring back some of the agency as part of the healing process. Brendan, you were going to add something?
Brendan: Yeah, there's literally nothing I could have added. I think you hit on the casual Ironman that I wanted to give Matt some props for, because he dropped it in the same way that Leah did with the headaches: "Oh yeah, this weekend I did an Ironman." We were like, what? He just did that? It was just remarkable. I just want to give him a hard time while we're on the subject. And Leah already echoed everything I could have echoed about it being your own journey. Even though Leah and Matt and I have been on this together, I think we all agree that our own paths look different. Not too much I could add to that, just wanted to add my own two cents.
Building a Healing Community: The Mind-Body Medicine Group
Dr. Stracks: Let's talk a little bit about the relationship that you've formed with each other and with some other people in this community as well, both the formal getting together with me for what would be considered appointments each month, and I think even more so the informal network you've formed. We hinted at it, but how did that evolve, and how do you keep it, as Matt put it earlier, from devolving into a lot of people yelling and asking how to swim? And how has it, for a couple of years now, managed to nourish you so substantially over that time?
Matt: Let me just start. One element is that it started in the incubation of Dr. Stracks's program. It's worth saying that it's easy to say it just happened organically, and it sort of did, but I think going back to those rules matters. When I look at our text chain, which goes a few times a week or whatever, it very, very rarely talks about physical pain or searching for an answer. That isn't to say it's toxic positivity either, but I think we've organically found a balance between those two things, where we share if people are having difficult emotional issues, by which I mean struggling with something. It's not "Brendan's saying my ankle hurts," it's, I'm not disclosing anything, but this is going on that's really hard in my life. I would say, and I'm curious, I'll throw the question to you guys, about 75 percent of it is a victory that we had or something we were grateful for or a resource that we found super helpful. For me, that fills my tank in ways that I can't fill it on my own.
Brendan: Yeah, I completely agree. I think the vast majority of the content that we share with each other is completely unrelated, or I guess if we're learning, tied together, but it's not talking about how we're physically feeling. It's sharing wins and resources, and man, the different avenues that I've been led down by Leah and Matt, the things that they've shared, whether it's podcasts or books or new studies about X, Y, and Z. As Matt mentioned before, there's so much tangentially related to the mind-body concept that it's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure. Early on I felt a little bit of pressure that if Leah or Matt would share a book or a podcast, I'd think, man, I feel like I have to read this. But I think we all learned now it's like, no, this is just an opportunity: hey, this is helpful, take it if you want it, leave it if you don't. It's funny, there have been a few things that I passed over a couple of times, and then finally it'll pop up again and I'll listen to it or read it and kick myself that I didn't read this a year ago.
But as Matt said, we've found this balance where we've developed this relationship where we can be real with each other too. We don't want to bring each other down, but we also want to be real. If someone's going through a difficult period in their life or has something they need to talk about, we've developed this relationship where we can be real: don't give me the cookie-cutter version, what's really going on? Not offering advice, but just trying to be a support network and offering our support in going through rough times. We've all had those, and we've all had pretty significant challenges outside of the mind-body syndrome since the group got together. Especially during COVID times, when I feel like we're so isolated in general, having this community together where you can cut through the noise and the classic "Hi, how are you, what's going on, life's great," it's good to have those relationships now where you can cut to the core of things pretty quickly and just be real. I just feel very grateful that we've had this opportunity over the last couple of years.
Leah: I was thinking, Matt, about what you're saying, how it was incubated in the first couple of groups we did with Dr. Stracks, and I think that really set us up in a really healthy way for a friendship and group, because we already had a sense of what healthy boundaries could look like. Even having that shared language is really helpful. If I talked to some of my other friends about boundaries, they'd look at me with a very skeptical look, but that's something that we've talked about: how to have healthy boundaries in our relationship, how to ask for help when we need help, but also how to say, "Hey, not sure if you're in this place right now, but I wanted to share this with you all." This shared vocabulary and mindset, not only about experiencing physical sensations and pain but also our outlook on the world and how we're moving through it, has been really helpful. Our text chain is full of, to me, a wall of inspiration, a source of encouragement and positivity and support, but also vulnerability and honesty around "this thing is hard," and being able to hold both of those two truths at the same time. I think that gets mirrored very well in our larger group and the other people that we are in community with, and being able to show up for one another in that way.
Lastly, I feel like there was this conversation we had early on, Matt, Brendan, and I, around our group, and we have been willing to have conversations where we step back and look at our relationship. One of the ones we did early on, which I thought was really healthy, was: would you still want to do this even if all of our physical sensations went away? I remember each of us being like, well, yeah, we're friends, we're not friends just because of our physical sensations or pain. There was something about that, knowing it wasn't a transactional relationship contingent upon being in physical pain to be in relationship with one another. We talked about that early on, when we were all in a lot of physical discomfort, and to me that was really crucial in saying, oh, this is a relationship that's different from something where I'm just going to get something from other people. It's more.
Dr. Stracks: And I noticed that too as we've gone along. We have these monthly calls, and there are eight of you plus me, nine of us total, and frequently I'll ask everybody for updates. Everybody will talk for five or seven minutes, and frequently at the end of that five or seven minutes I'll recognize that whoever was speaking hasn't said a single word about how they're feeling physically. Sometimes I don't even bother, sometimes I ask, "Oh, how's your back, or your head?" But I've noticed that as people learn more about this, it becomes much more about what's going on in our lives and what's going on in our minds with our emotions, and the focus often moves away from the physical sensations. I think that's probably hard for people listening to believe, but I often notice that fairly quickly when I'm working with people. That doesn't mean the other challenges aren't substantial, of figuring out how to be kind to ourselves or let our emotions out or be vulnerable, all these skills that help to make the pain go away, but I think they're often even harder than managing the physical discomfort.
Noticing Improvement and Staying on the Healing Journey
Dr. Stracks: We're going to wind down within the next few minutes, but thinking about what I said a little earlier, that all of you are in such a different place than you were two and a half years ago when I first met you, and none of you would tell me that you feel like, "Okay, my work here is done and there are no more physical sensations." Any thoughts about how you manage that tension of having come so far in your journey and feeling like there are still things you're working on and ways to go? And then, as a sidelight, if you want another piece to comment on: oftentimes people get started in this journey and feel like they're really not improving at all, and when we break it down we find out there's actually been substantial improvement, but it doesn't feel like that for a variety of reasons. Either of those thoughts, on the continued journey and on noticing the improvement when it's there?
Brendan: Yeah, I can jump in. I'll start with not noticing improvement. That was so much of the first, call it, four, five, six months at least before I really even realized much of a significant dent. I would feel a little bit of movement and another relationship to the pain, but it's hard to describe. A word that I was not aware of before we began this journey is "felt sense," this idea of something that's almost like intuition, like I just feel something from the body that feels intuitively right for me. I kind of had to work with that faith. For me it was the right time to get into TMS because I was out of other options and I had felt this movement. I know that putting myself in the shoes that I was back then, I would like to hear someone say, in a much different place now, keep going, if you feel intuitively that this work is worth it, keep going. I can only speak about my experience, but I am eons better than I was, even six months ago. It just continues to build upon itself.
Then, leading to the next question about how I keep going: oh my God, it's gratitude. How could I not? For someone who's been in chronic pain as long as the three of us on this call have, it's hard to describe the place of desperation that I think all of us were in. I can speak for myself. I remember a specific moment. I had just finished mowing the lawn, and this is before I found TMS, when I was first starting to think about chronic pain programs. I came back inside and I was in such full-body chronic pain that I just took a bath and felt like, this is it, this is the rest of my life, this is over. When I paint it in that context, which is hard to remember now, and it's hard to say out loud, and then think about it from that context, where I've got a little bit of pain, a little bit of discomfort, I'm dealing with these uncomfortable sensations that I really want to avoid right now, I've just seen the proof is in the pudding. By doing this work I've seen so much of my life transform and change, and new connections in every sense of the word: physically, mentally, spiritually. It's been phenomenal. Frankly, I can't imagine any other possibility but continuing to do the work that we've done.
Dr. Stracks: I love that so much, Brendan. "I can't imagine any other path."
Leah: And it's sort of like what Jill Rydell told me in that phone call, which is, well, you'll get to learn more about yourself. It's ironic, because the last few years in which I've been deeper in the mind-body medicine world, in which I experienced tons of chronic pain, were simultaneously some of the happiest years of my life when I look back on the last 32 years, because I've been doing things that I wanted to do or didn't even know that I wanted to do. That dichotomy is very, very strange. If you're listening to this and that makes no sense, I completely understand. It might not make any sense at all and might not be where you are, which is completely okay. For me, how I hold those two tensions, and I actually think it's important to hold them together, is how do I sit in the tension of not being, quote unquote, cured, and how do I look back and think about improvements? When I look back and celebrate the wins, I'm able to see that things have improved and gotten better. For a very long time I thought that success had a single storyline: success meant that I was free of all of my headaches and chronic pain. I think that narrative is well-intentioned but can be dangerous, because I don't think there is a single story along your healing path. For me there have been lots of moments of success, and Dr. Stracks, I feel like you really helped me with this, as I started to change what I considered success to look like, that's when I started to really notice so much improvement. I remember telling you, I have no idea what it feels like to not have a headache, but I think I have maybe one or two on the pain scale, and you said, "What if we just called it a zero?" I was like, I don't know, okay, let's try it. Even that idea was a total reframe for me, to start to see, oh, this is a moment of improvement and this is a moment of success.
If you're listening right now and it feels like maybe you're not at the success narrative that you've portrayed, I'd really encourage you to look for those little wins, because there have been so many of them, and I know they're hard to hold on to. I'm taking away from Matt's little journals that maybe I want to put them down and visualize them more, because those have been really crucial to keeping up my momentum. Two years ago I never would have thought I would be working full time ever again, and now I don't even think about the fact that I'm doing that, and I need to hold on to that. I think that's sometimes where community and friends and family can be helpful, to mirror back the things that we now consider so normal. Matt, any thoughts from your end on either of these?
Matt: I think Brendan and Leah put it so well that I'm most intimidated to add to it, but I reflect everything they said. Just to do it again, the value of community is humongous for the times when things are not going well. In a lot of parts of our lives, especially in a world where things are condensed down to tweets and small nuggets of information, there's a narrative that recovery is a binary thing, and life's not binary. There are challenges, and all three of us, especially this year, have gone through different challenges, and you're going to have ups and downs. The one thing that always sticks with me, Dr. Stracks tells the example of a roller coaster: it has to go down to build the momentum to go up. I'm sure if someone's in a lot of pain listening to that right now, it may come off as a little flippant on my part, like, oh, I don't want to go down to go up. But I would just say, from my experience, any time that I've had a really bad stretch, it's always followed by a really good stretch that I think needed that momentum. All of that is super ethereal, but for me it's also super true. I almost don't want to ever not be in pain, because I think pain is a signal to me to approach things differently, or to have some sort of introspection, or to rely on other people. It's really a learning tool. Not that I want to ever be in the type of pain I was in before, but a little bit of pain isn't all bad. It's part of why we're humans, and it's there for a reason.
Dr. Stracks: Yeah. And Leah, the podcast that you referenced from the summer on Curable's podcast with Christie Uipi, the therapist who's in Las Vegas with UnitedHealth now, she says she really appreciates that her body sticks up for her. That's how she puts it in that podcast. As you guys know, the pain is not the enemy, and I really liked how she phrases it: it's her body telling her and reminding her that there are things she needs to take care of that she's not taken care of.
How to Find a Supportive Chronic Pain Community
Dr. Stracks: We're going to stop in just a sec. I'm going to go backwards for one sec because there was a question that I wanted to throw out and get some quick thoughts on. People who are listening and hearing you talk about the community may be having the thought, okay, that sounds great, how do I do that? You may not have answers. The common answer is that people can join the Curable groups, they can tap into my classes, and lots of people are listening and watching on Facebook, so Curable certainly has a robust Facebook group, and I have a robust Facebook group. Any other thoughts, and you may not have any, on what's allowed you to find a group that has been really nourishing and supportive as you've been walking through this?
Leah: The first thought that comes to mind is just to take a risk. Take the risk to join the group, whether it's the Curable groups or one of the Facebook groups or one of Dr. Stracks's groups, and even then, within that, trust some of your intuition. If there's someone in that group who speaks to you, or there seems to be some sort of connection with your story, say hi, try to reach out. As an adult, that isn't how I typically thought of making friends. I just kept whoever I had in my circle. I've been really lucky that it's actually worked out when I've taken that little leap of joining a smaller group, or when someone mentioned a text chain and I was willing to do it. Another person in our group I've become really close friends with: we were at a workshop together and sitting near each other, and I just sensed that she might be similarly minded, and I gave her my phone number like an awkward first date, and we've become really close friends. It might not always work out that way, you might say, no, this isn't what I want to do, but it could turn out to be a really beautiful thing.
Matt: I was going to second the workshop idea. I know Dr. Stracks has done an in-person workshop that all three of us attended, and COVID makes that difficult, but I'm sure down the road that's part of the long-term plan, because it works so well. Similar to that, which is harder in COVID times, is getting off our phones and our computers. One thing that the workshop was really powerful for, and that Dr. Stracks heavily includes, is Zoom face-to-face within his treatment. Meeting people, even if it's on Zoom, is just so much more powerful for building a connection than trying to find friends on Facebook or that type of thing. It takes more effort, and as Leah said, more vulnerability, but I think it's key to actually connect with humans in the way that we're evolutionarily designed to connect.
Closing
Dr. Stracks: Thank you, and we're going to end there, right at two hours. We'll go ahead and sign off, but I am unbelievably grateful to all three of you for being here today, talking about this, being open, being vulnerable, being supportive like you always are. I'm also grateful to the other people that you've mentioned who are in that Monday night group with you and have continued to get together every month for a couple of years now and work on this and share successes and share struggles. I know how much everybody who's listening appreciates you being here, donating your time and your experiences and what's been helpful to you over this time period. I also want to thank everybody who's been listening to this extended discussion. Each time we record, I am touched again by how brave and creative and wonderful this group of people is who are working on this solution to chronic health issues that is so different from what's normally talked about in the medical system. So bravo to the three of you, to the people we work with in this particular community, and to all the larger community out there that's been watching and listening and learning.
As I said earlier this evening, we've expanded our telehealth options, so people who want to connect with me directly are able to do so no matter where you are. Go ahead and contact us at www.cormendihealth.com, and my staff will get back to you with all the information you need to know. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find the recording to watch again and all our previous episodes on Curable's Hope for Healing page at curablehealth.com/hopeforhealing. You can also sign up for either of our newsletters to get updates about next episodes and everything else that's going on in our practice. I will be back with the three of them in four weeks, on Wednesday, February 10th, at 5 p.m. Central Time, for the next episode. I hope you can join us then. Until then, please stay safe and healthy, and have a good night, everybody. Thanks, everybody.
Leah, Brendan, and Matt: Thanks, Dr. Stracks.
Looking for help with chronic pain, migraines, or other persistent symptoms? Dr. John Stracks at Cormendi Health in Chicago offers telehealth mind-body medicine appointments. Visit cormendihealth.com to get started.
Dr. John Stracks practices mind-body medicine via telehealth nationally and internationally. To learn more about working with Dr. Stracks or the Cormendi Health team, visit cormendihealth.com. You can find more interviews on the Cormendi Health YouTube page.