Here is the full transcript and summary of Amy Baxter’s talk titled “How to Hack Your Brain When You’re in Pain” at TED conference.
In this TED talk, researcher and physician Amy Baxter challenges the misconceptions surrounding pain and shares techniques to hack the brain and manage pain. She emphasizes that pain is a learning system for survival and should be understood, not silenced. Baxter discusses the power of non-pharmacological methods such as vibration, motion, cold, and distraction in reducing pain. She also shares her personal experience of using physiological hacks to alleviate pain and highlights the dangers of opioids in turning on the reward system instead of completely eliminating pain.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So if you whack your thumb with a hammer, you think pain is in your thumb. Physicians have a more sophisticated understanding. We know that it’s an alarm that goes on nerves to your spine, where it is translated to your brain, and pain actually happens somewhere. It’s a little vague.
We actually only get two days of pain education throughout all of medical school, so… In fact, the only pain lecture I remember from the ’90s was in a dark room like this, after being awake for 30 hours and hungry, and finding out our noon lecture was sponsored by OxyContin. We got pens, we got great lasagna, and they had very cool slides that showed pain stopped by opioids. And we learned that home opioids aren’t addictive, and if you stay ahead of pain, you can keep your patients pain-free.
And beyond the obviously egregious marketing, I think it was framing “pain-free” as the goal that has destroyed countless lives. My friend’s son Christopher started having severe abdominal pain during this “no-pain” era. Eventually, he was diagnosed with a colon disease and had surgery his senior year.
They sent Christopher home with 90 OxyContin, and then 90 more, and then, as the pain started getting faster and faster… Uncontrolled pain is terrifying. So when his ran out and his friends’ medicine cabinets ran out, Christopher tried heroin. And Christopher Wolf lost his battle with substance use at age 32.
So did we misunderstand pain? What if pain isn’t an alarm to silence but a learning system for survival? Pain is every organism’s primary learning system for survival. I mean, it’s like, “Ouch. Don’t touch that.” Or, to paraphrase “The Princess Bride,”… “Life is pain, Highness.”
“Pain-free” was marketing, and it made physicians think that one pill could solve pain. It still makes people feel like you can’t be happy if you have some pain, and we now know that if you want to move past pain, it takes work. Setting the bar at “pain-free” was too high. Plenty of people could have been more comfortable, but they gave up because pain-free was out of reach.
We have really good new information that I’m going to share, and so from now on, I want you to think about pain as a Venn diagram, with physiology, fear and control. I’m going to tell you how each of these can give you power over pain.
Right now, I’m translating these, in my research, into a low-back pain device to reduce opioid use. But 20 years ago, I just wanted to have a fast cure for needle pain, for IV access and my kids’ shots. I was driving home one night after a graveyard shift, and my hands were vibrating on the steering wheel, because we needed to get the tires balanced. I was ignoring that to think about pain, and when I got home and reached for the door in my house, my hand was numb.
So I burst in, my Boy Scout husband grabbed some frozen peas, and we had ourselves a genuine eureka moment, where cold and vibration blocked pain. Over the next decade, I found the right frequency to block pain, I got a grant, and I created Buzzy, which is vibration plus ice … in a bee shape. And you put it on your arm when you’re getting an injection.
And to date, 45 million needle procedures had decreased pain, and over 80 randomized controlled trials, independently, all around the world, have been published. But at about 30 randomized controlled trials in, one of my colleagues came to me and confided that he was in opioid recovery. And he asked whether or not Buzzy could let him get through a total knee replacement drug-free. I’d never thought about it. It’s the same pain nerve for knees as for needles, so I said maybe. And he did it. Vibration plus cold replaced OxyContin.
So at that point, I went all in, to figure out why. And here is what we know. So the reason that vibration decreases pain is because the physiology of the nerves of light touch, pressure, stretching and motion all races pain to the spine. Now people have tried electricity to trigger the light-touch nerves, but we now know that motion, shown in green, is what’s most effective at shutting the gate on sharp pain. This is called gate control, and the exact right frequency of vibration triggers the nerves that decrease pain.
The physiology of ice is different. So the cold goes up to the brain, where the conductor goes, “Obnoxious, but not dangerous. I will decrease sensations coming from everywhere.” And it decreases pain everywhere. If a child was so freaked out from previous experiences that even the swab hurt, physiology wasn’t as helpful. So we added distraction, like a monkey poster.
And what we discovered was combining counting plus making a decision cut pain in half. So, for example, “How many monkeys are actually touching the bed?” activates the decision switchboard. I know what you guys are doing. It’s five. Here is your pain hack for the day, though. If you do not have monkeys on hand, then find any sentence and count how many of the letters have holes in them.
Counting, deciding. So, like, you’ve got a g-hole, o-hole, a … hole. I guarantee you and your family will use this.
The biggest hack, though, is understanding why distraction works. And now, through functional MRI, we can actually see pain happen. And it’s not one place. Pain is a symphony of connections, from the sensation area to the conductor, to the decision switchboard, and then to fear, memory, meaning, control.
So if the decision switchboard is occupied sorting monkeys, it can’t notify fear and meaning, and you feel less pain. What you feel is mostly what you expect to feel. Stay with me. If you’re a kid, the same punch hurts more from a bully than from your buddy. And if you’re an adult and you feel something, the second you think it’s cancer, it hurts more and more, until you find out it’s not. And those same kids who had horrible shot experiences can tolerate all kinds of needle pain to look cool. Because it is a different context.
These patterns, called connectomes, are very personal, because experiences lay down more of the same sensation. And we now know that people who have certain areas in the brain connected feel more pain than people with different areas connected. And more importantly, untreated pain or intense pain can lay down heavier connections, so that even when your body is healed, you will still feel more pain. It’s this very plasticity and personalization which makes the physiology, fear, control matrix so useful.
Because choosing physiologic options that you can layer, that work for you, decreases pain, like heat, cold, vibration, deep relaxation, acupuncture, capsaicin, exercise, meditation… There’s more.
Christopher probably had 10 of these around his house and just didn’t know it. Having control over your options decreases pain. Deep breathing increases control. Choosing what to focus on increases control. Fear and control are the volume knobs for pain. Fear controls so many of our sensations, this shouldn’t be unusual, but we don’t practice it for pain. So if you’re home alone and you hear a clunk, your hearing becomes hypersensitive.
But when you remember your kid’s home from college, your fear dials down and your brain overrides it and says, “Don’t worry about it.” Saint Augustine called pain the greatest of evil. But if it is a survival system, it cannot be all evil. So instead, think of pain as your nagging, safety-obsessed, exaggerating friend who’s sometimes wrong. And it’s OK to ignore or override your friend if you know that you’re safe. This takes practice.
On a flight that was turbulent, I had an entire cup of scalding-hot coffee dumped straight on my ankle. Electric jolt through my scalp. I ripped off my sock; it was already red. It was going to blister. There was no way I could get my foot into that little sink to get cold water on it. And then I remembered.
Physiology hack
I had an unopened cold beer. Medical-grade cold beer went on my ankle, stat. I had a vibrator in my carry-on, because I would. On my ankle. And then the pain kind. And then my fear hack. I’m like, “There’s a barf bag that has holy letters, but I’m going to put it in the pocket pouch and save it, because then, I have increased control.”
And, pain, I was no longer that concerned. Although then, I realized I’m that guy, with my bare foot sticking out in the aisle on a plane, with a beer on it. Power over pain isn’t always pretty, but it is possible and it is absolutely critical. Because there’s one more misconception we have not talked about. I honestly thought that opioids turned off some pain switch. They turn on our reward system. So some people feel amazing, but most people just still feel pain, but don’t care.
Now, this is a godsend for people with chronic pain diseases. We should not take them away. And in the trauma bay, the more morphine in the first 24 hours after a burn or a wound, the less post-traumatic stress, the less chronic pain later.
But studies show that recovery after surgery is just as well accomplished with coaching and physiologic options. And if you’re one of the people who feel amazing with opioids, it’s too risky. A study in 2019 found that one in 15 young adults who got opioids for their wisdom tooth removal had substance-use disorder within a year. Ibuprofen works better.
So what do we do? Well, in my dream world, we have health-care systems—paid-for options and coaching—for Christophers everywhere. And we quit giving double-digit prescriptions for opioids for home recovery. In the real world, 80,000 people died in the US last year from opioid overdoses, and 80 percent of substance-use disorders start with a pill prescribed for pain… Usually taken from your friend’s medicine cabinet. People can’t afford options. Doctors, 20 years later, still don’t know them. But you do. You all now know to throw away the opioids in your medicine cabinet.
You now know that there are options you can use to decrease pain, and you know that “pain-free” should be ditched for “more comfortable.” And whether you dump scalding coffee or pain wakes you and exhausts you every day… Options that are in your control can allow you to reframe pain. Thank you.
Question and Answer session
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Amy, thank you, it’s amazing. So how do you think that pain scales have set us back from this work that you’re doing, and how is the NIH treating pain and addiction differently now?
Amy Baxter: So in one of the 120 versions of this talk, I talked about how the thing is, in the ’90s, if we wanted to “disease-ify” pain, it meant we had to be able to measure it. So that was where the FACES scales come from, and they’re actually very useful in the emergency department to tell whether or not a medicine is working. In fact, we were one of the first ones that showed, with sickle cell, that the patient’s report, based on those scales, was what was most indicative of whether they needed to be admitted, rather than any biologic marker.
But what we’re doing now is we’re using something called the PROMIS scales, so it’s how intense pain is on five-point scales, how much it interferes, so there’s pain interference, pain intensity. And the way we’re looking at pain is much more on
the impact for the person, rather than trying to pretend there’s any kind of objective pain measurement.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: OK. And you mentioned that you’re working on some new applications for Buzzy, specifically for back pain. What are some of the possibilities that we have here for what this could do for us in the future?
Amy Baxter: On my tombstone, there’s going to be a vibrating bee. It’s actually called DuoTherm, not Buzzy. But what we’ve learned is that there are harmonics of interaction between the specific frequencies that cancel out the pain. So there’s one particular nerve called the Pacinian that has a very specific frequency range. And by causing them to interact, we’re starting to explore more about the pain that’s coming from the fascia between the skin and between the muscles.
But that area is where we’re unexplored, and so by interacting with different frequencies and then layering heat or cold, pressure options, giving people the choice of so many different ways to do it, it’s really engaging all the different areas of the brain from which pain comes.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Wow, OK. Well, thank you so much, Amy.