Healing One Step at a Time with Dr. John Stracks and Jodie Prado
Video: Watch the full session here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67xIKj5GTY8
Dr. John Stracks: Good evening and welcome to Hope for Healing. I'm Dr. John Stracks, joining you from my office in Chicago. Hope for Healing is a joint effort between myself and the Curable app — we both focus on the reduction and elimination of physical symptoms using mind-body medicine methods and have been working together since their inception.
A note on framework: mind-body medicine means that our bodies can express what's going on in our minds and in our lives. That's universal — it doesn't make us bad or sick, it makes us human. The goal is to help you understand that and learn what to do about it so it's no longer painful or uncomfortable. And importantly: the lessons that apply to one type of pain apply to all pain. Tonight's guest dealt with foot pain, but everything she learned applies whether you have migraines, back pain, fibromyalgia, or something else entirely.
Tonight I'm joined by Jody Prado, a friend and former patient who first came to me in 2014 after suffering from chronic foot pain for the previous 13 years. Her pain started in 2001, steadily worsened to the point that she could no longer walk, and eventually cost her her job as a personal trainer. After we began working together, she used mind-body techniques to slowly and steadily heal, and today she has regained full control over her active lifestyle. Jody, thank you for being here.
Jody Prado: Thanks for having me. I'll be honest — I'm a little nervous. My usual audience is my eight-year-old daughter during homeschooling. But I agreed to do this because I remember sitting in a panel discussion a few years back, still in pain, thinking: if I ever get to the point of being healed, I want to pay it forward. If I can help even one person, the discomfort of a live interview is worth it.
Life Before the Pain
Dr. Stracks: Tell us a little about your life before this started.
Jody: I was in my mid-twenties, just starting my first real job as a pharmaceutical sales rep. I'd just moved downtown Chicago, had great friends, disposable income for the first time — just really enjoying life. I was heavily involved in health and fitness, became a part-time personal trainer alongside my sales job, started competing in fitness competitions, and was training for a marathon. Life was really good.
The Beginning: 2001
Jody: My pain started in 2001 when I was about 25, training for a marathon. It felt like running on concrete with no padding — bone on ground. I went to a podiatrist, and even though my symptoms didn't really line up with plantar fasciitis, that's where they started. Night splints, ice, stretching, massage therapy, custom orthotics. None of it helped, and the pain kept progressing.
Over the next five years, the pain worsened. I was on my feet all day as a sales rep, then personal training on top of it. But I was determined not to let it impact my life. I didn't tell most people — it was a grin-and-bear-it situation. Researching my pain and finding doctors had become a part-time job. Doctors would feel extremely confident they knew what was wrong, I'd get my hopes up, and then it wouldn't help at all. That cycle happened over and over.
Eventually the pain spread from my heel to my entire foot. The most frustrating part wasn't the pain itself — it was not having a diagnosis. And I noticed something strange: whatever kind of specialist I saw, my problem was always something in their specialty. Orthopedic? It was definitely bone. Rheumatologist? Definitely autoimmune. It was mind-boggling how narrow-minded each person seemed.
Over the next decade I tried: massage therapy twice a week for two years, compression stockings, multiple nerve conduction tests with needles in my muscles — nothing came back with a clear answer. I started to believe I was so rare a case that a test to detect my condition simply hadn't been invented yet.
The Surgeries: 2010–2011
Jody: In 2010 — nine years in — an MRI found a ganglion cyst. They recommended surgery. I got four opinions and no two doctors agreed, but I ultimately found a physician in Arizona who was convinced I had tarsal tunnel syndrome. He was extraordinary — spent countless personal hours with me. I believed in him desperately. He recommended an implant in one foot to relieve nerve pressure, with a plan to do the other foot if it worked.
I'll never forget stepping on that foot four weeks after surgery. The pain was there instantly. It hadn't worked.
He remained confident he had a plan, and I was too desperate not to follow it. I had two more surgeries. The third caused serious complications — they nicked a sensory nerve. I woke up to my husband saying the doctor had found a blockage and fixed it. I cried tears of joy. By the next morning, I'd lost feeling from my knee to my foot, and the nerve damage triggered a new layer of nerve pain I hadn't had before.
Then, about seven months after that third surgery, my feet turned bright red. Alarming, scary red. The physician and his colleague believed it was Complex Regional Pain Syndrome — a diagnosis no one wants, involving intense pain, sensation changes, and color changes, often triggered by trauma like surgery.
I was furious at myself for pursuing the surgeries. I felt like my life was ending.
Pregnancy, the NICU, and Mayo Clinic
Jody: I was now pregnant and couldn't receive treatment. I became consumed with grief about all the things I wouldn't be able to do — walking with my baby, pushing a stroller, leaving the house. A month before my due date, my feet were burning so badly each night I was putting them in buckets of water with a fan blowing on them.
Through more research I found a condition called erythromelalgia — a rare disorder where extremities turn bright red with mild heat or activity, sometimes triggered by surgical trauma. By the time my daughter was born, I couldn't bear weight at all. She was in the NICU with breathing issues. I was in a wheelchair to visit her. I started having pins and needles in my arms, stabbing shocks of pain — my body felt like it was shutting down.
When my daughter was two weeks old, we made the decision to drive to Mayo Clinic in the middle of the night. We tried to get in through the ER — they're on to that. But somehow, after explaining everything, an ER doctor gave me a referral to their erythromelalgia specialist — something the nurse said she'd never seen in 20 years.
Mayo confirmed the erythromelalgia diagnosis, provided some topical cream and research articles, and sent me to see a therapist on staff. That therapist said something I didn't fully absorb at the time but now recognize as remarkably accurate: I'd had a perfect storm of simultaneous, unsolvable problems. My body was in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and that was driving a significant portion of my symptoms. She said I was a fixer — and when every problem resisted a fix, my nervous system went into overdrive.
The Chronic Pain Program
Jody: Back home, I was crawling around, using a knee scooter and a wheelchair, and had hired someone to help with the baby. In 2013 — twelve years after the pain began — I entered a pain management program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. I figured this was the last resort. If the pain couldn't be cured, I needed to learn how to manage it.
The program introduced me to biofeedback and other calming techniques. I got my blood pressure down without medication. And then, in April 2013, the erythromelalgia just went away. Miraculously. Fewer than one percent of patients experience that. I still don't know exactly why — but I wonder whether calming my nervous system through biofeedback had tipped things back under some threshold.
The foot pain remained. But that's when, in October 2014, I finally found my way to mind-body medicine.
Finding Mind-Body Medicine
Jody: I'd actually heard about Dr. Sarno years earlier and dismissed it. I was too science-minded. Foot pain didn't seem like something the brain would cause. But then someone I'd been corresponding with — a man in Iceland with a similar story — told me there was a physician in Chicago who worked in the mind-body space. I Googled it and Dr. Stracks came up, maybe a mile from where I lived. He happened to be hosting a success panel the very next night.
I sat there expecting to have my hopes raised and crushed again. A woman spoke who'd been in a wheelchair with full-body pain, including foot pain at one point. She journaled, had an emotional breakthrough involving her relationship with her father, and recovered. I was skeptical. But I went.
Dr. Stracks: What do you remember about our first appointment?
Jody: You were different from other doctors — you never said "I know exactly what's wrong, I'm definitely going to fix you." You said you thought this could be related to how the mind affects the body, here's why, and left me to sit with it. You pointed out that in 13 years, with every test, every scan, every specialist — nothing had ever shown anything definitively wrong. And rather than telling me they just hadn't found the right test yet, you offered a different explanation.
The Healing Process: Gradual, Not Dramatic
Jody: I took Dr. Stracks's writing class and started working through Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner. Going through the personality traits list was like checking every single box — perfectionism, high expectations, wanting to be liked, overly responsible, difficulty letting go, constant worrying. At minimum, I fit the profile completely.
Dr. Stracks also asked about what was happening in my life when the pain started in 2001. My parents had divorced the year before, but more significantly — I had very young parents, and I grew up in a household with a lot of instability. I'd always described it matter-of-factly, like it was just normal. Dr. Stracks gently pointed out that I might be minimizing it — that what felt like "just how it was" might have had a larger impact than I recognized. Now that I have an eight-year-old, I can see that starkly.
Eventually what made the most sense to me was this: my brain had learned during marathon training that heel pain equaled damage. Even if there was a small initial injury, my brain got caught in a faulty pain loop, perpetuated by fear and anxiety. Every time I stood up, I already knew I'd be in pain. Fear drove the pain, pain drove the fear. A learned cycle I had to unlearn.
Dr. Stracks: My memory is that it was a very gradual process — not a single dramatic breakthrough, but also not a single step backwards. Is that how you remember it?
Jody: Yes. I kept emailing you saying "it's not working" and you'd say, "Didn't you just tell me you stood for ten minutes? You were crawling around before." I was waiting for the big transformation. I didn't recognize the small wins as wins.
The biggest shift in thinking for me was a concept I encountered through the TMS Wiki forum — outcome independence. The idea was that I'd been measuring success by whether each walk was good or bad. Good walk = optimistic; bad walk = whole day ruined. And I was told: that attitude is reinforcing the pain cycle. Stop measuring success by whether you have a good walk. Measure it by how little you care. That was revolutionary to me. I still use it today.
I also remember planning a trip to Disney World — years into recovery, still uncertain if I could handle a full day. We went. I walked 10 to 12 hours. I used a small travel stool a handful of times while waiting in line. At the time it felt like a massive success. A few weeks later I'd somehow rewritten it in my memory as a failure — "I had to use that stool, the whole trip was terrible." My husband had to remind me what actually happened. My brain, so trained to look for evidence of failure, had erased the evidence of success.
Eventually I stopped working on the pain intentionally. We moved to the suburbs — a crazy, 20-hour moving day. I looked at my Fitbit: 22,000 steps. I couldn't rationalize that away. And then, gradually, months passed where I didn't think about my feet at all. I never thought I'd say that. I'm now at 97 or 98 percent. It's just not in the foreground of my life anymore.
The COVID Moment
Jody: Just last month I had a reminder of how powerful the mind still is. We were driving to Florida and I noticed a scratchy throat. I pulled off in Alabama and got a rapid COVID test — negative — but they said they'd send a more definitive test and call with results. They never called, so I assumed it was fine.
On vacation the symptoms continued — headache, sore throat, vertigo. When we got home, my husband suggested I just call to confirm the result. The woman told me: "Oh yes, that test was negative." Twenty minutes later I bounced out of bed — no sore throat, no vertigo, no headache. Gone. If that wasn't proof of the mind's power over physical symptoms, I don't know what is. I had convinced myself I was sick, and my body had obliged.
Q&A Highlights
Q: Is there anything you'd have done differently looking back?
Jody: Not thrown away the Sarno book seven years before I was ready to hear it — but honestly, I don't think I would have been receptive earlier. The bigger thing is I wish I'd had more grace with myself throughout the process. I was hard on myself for not having the epiphany moment, for not journaling the right way, for not healing as quickly as others. Fifteen years in pain means deeply ingrained neural pathways. In retrospect, a year and a half of work to get to Disney World is actually remarkable.
Q: How do you reassure people who have been on a healing journey for a long time and feel discouraged?
Jody: I was that person. I sat in panels thinking "I'll never be that success story." But I was in the deepest, darkest place possible — sending emails to family members essentially saying "this is our life now, please stop asking." And I came out of it. Feet seem like such a random place for mind-body pain — but that's exactly why I want to tell this story. Your brain puts pain where it makes sense: I ran a marathon, heel pain made logical sense. Whatever your symptom and wherever it is, these techniques can work.
Dr. Stracks: On the self-critical voice specifically — I see this as one of the biggest obstacles as people work toward healing. If someone's journaling about how slow their progress is and how bad they are at healing, the writing isn't helping — it's hurting. The rule I give people is: if you're attacking yourself in the writing, stop. Being kind to yourself, giving yourself grace, is not a soft add-on to this process. It's central to it.
Q: Were there specific tools or techniques that were most helpful?
Jody: The TMS Wiki forum was huge for me — real-time answers from therapists and other people going through the same thing, plus a large library of success stories. I also worked weekly with a mind-body therapist in California over Skype, which helped break the process into manageable chunks after the writing class ended. And the concept of outcome independence was probably the single biggest shift in how I thought about the pain.
But honestly — and Dr. Stracks said something really important about this — it wasn't really about the tools. It was about coming to genuinely understand that I wasn't sick, nothing was broken, and fear was driving everything. As that understanding settled in over time, the fear loosened. And as the fear loosened, the pain loosened.
Q: How do you handle physical treatments while doing this work — should people stop them?
Jody: I'd already given most of them up because none were working. But the key thing for me was deciding to stop searching for new medical explanations. I stopped googling new diagnoses and doctors. I drew a line: this is what I'm working on now. I think people can continue physical treatments as they transition — just be mindful of whether the practitioner is aligned with a mind-body understanding or actively undermining it.
Dr. John Stracks practices mind-body medicine via telehealth nationally and internationally, focused on the reduction and elimination of chronic pain and physical symptoms. To learn more about him, visit johnstracksmd.com. Jody Prado is a former patient who healed from 13 years of chronic foot pain using mind-body medicine. Hope for Healing is a collaboration between Dr. Stracks and the Curable app.