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by denvaar 1541 days ago
This is an interesting article. I would like to hear more information about how the therapy is actually done. This reminds me of techniques like Edmund Jacobson's "Progressive Relaxation". I'm also reading a book called, "A Headache in the Pelvis", which claims that essential to healing is this idea that we must learn to properly relax and accept the pain we feel. I've found it hard to collect actual instruction about how to do this though.
2 comments

Yeah I'm very curious to know how this Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) from the article is done.

I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I'd say from my personal experience a physical yoga practice helps teach you to properly relax into what can sometimes be extreme discomfort. I remember when I first started practicing, whenever we'd get to long holds of poses (e.g. splits, pigeon, ustrasana), my body would start panicking and want me to come out of it immediately. But if you just keep bringing your awareness to the breath and meditate through the sensations that arise, the body starts relaxing and accepts where it's at.

I can imagine the PRT therapy probably includes some subset of the four foundations of mindfulness [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satipatthana

See my reply to denvaar for an example!

It has much in common with mindfulness I'd say, with some extra "simplified" techniques and learnings. It's easy to dismiss this type of therapy (even more so before there were studies on it), but the mindset changes which it advocates are very wholesome and are likely to increase quality of life even if it would fail to lessen the pain, so there's very little to lose!

Sounds quite similar! Alan Gordon (who treated the patients in the study) has a free program online[1] which goes through the ideas behind PRT (though it doesn't call it PRT in there, I think that term is much more recent).

[1]: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/painrecovery/