A talk therapy left 2 in 3 back pain patients pain-free or nearly so

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tested an idea on 151 adults with years of back pain and no clear injury. Patients were randomly assigned to four weeks of talk therapy retraining how the brain reads pain, an open-label placebo shot, or usual care.

Two thirds of the group given the talk therapy became pain-free or nearly pain-free by the end of treatment, compared with about one in five given the open-label placebo and one in ten given usual care. Brain scans taken before and after showed reduced activity in regions tied to pain processing in the treated group.

The gains held up at one-year follow-up, and a later check-in found many participants still pain-free after five years, an unusually durable result for chronic pain treatment of any kind. The approach does not suit every case of back pain, particularly where a clear structural cause is present, and the original trial was run by one research group, which later groups are now working to replicate.

The pain left when the brain changed.