It's Not in Your Head Dr. Dan Bates & Justine Feitelson

In this episode, Dr. Dan and Justine introduce their 'Central Sensitization Algorithm' designed to help healthcare providers diagnose and treat central sensitization and related neuroinflammatory disorders more effectively. The algorithm categorizes symptoms into distinct buckets of nervous system dysfunction, allowing providers to more quickly and efficiently identify and prioritize their treatment plan. By addressing potential pre-existing diagnoses and symptoms, the sensitization algorithm...

In this episode of "It's Not In Your Head," Dan and Justine dive into the nuanced aspects of how to more effectively communicate about pain with patients, focusing on the significance of specific language and its impact on patient outcomes. They caution against phrases that suggest pain is purely psychological and inadvertently blame and shame the patient, emphasizing pain is a complex interplay of physiological and psychological factors. They stress the importance of clinicians avoiding lang...

Trigger warning: This episode deals with the topic of suicide.Dan and I have an interesting and important discussion that bridges the gap between patients’ clear and obvious frustrations with how different versions of “it’s in your head” affect them and providers’ lack of awareness around the issue. How can this be the case? And how does being told pain is in your head possibly increase suicidal thoughts by 500-1200%? We explain how it occurs and compare it to what we’d accept from other ther...

From the uterus, to witchcraft, hypnotism and more, we go through the history of what unexplainable symptoms have been blamed on and how they've been explained through history all the way up to more modern day classifications like Briquette's syndrome, somatoform, conversion, or functional disorders. We tease apart risk factors and other patterns that have been identified to lead to symptoms commonly labelled as ‘hysteria’, and the resulting biases that have carried through into modern medici...

In this episode, we expand upon 'Number Needed to Treat', tying that concept into overall therapeutic limitations and some other examples beyond medications, including one you are definitely going to want to hear about - the effect of pain neuroscience education in and of itself.So how much does understanding pain actually decrease pain? It depends, but not as much as you'd think...We'll introduce a study that teases this apart and share a few different ways to interpret this so you can see h...

The hard truth is it's normal for treatments, especially medications, not to work. But how many patients do you actually have to treat to improve things for just one even? This is where the concept 'number needed to treat' is critical to better understand so that expectations don't lead to resentments.Managing expectations as a patient is hard, it's even harder when they're unrealistic. Unfortunately, there is little conversation around what is likely to work in various settings, and what the...