The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain
Alan Gordon
A groundbreaking mind-body protocol to heal chronic pain, backed by new research. Chronic pain is an epidemic. Fifty million Americans struggle with back pain, headaches, or some other pain that resists all treatment. more
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published Avery
4.42
Rating
2529
Ratings
308
Reviews
Alan Gordon
1 books 18 followers
Community reviews
Know someone who suffers from chronic pain. The last thing you want to tell him is it's all in his head. Pain is real. And it's wherever you're feeling it. That said, it's in your head. more
4. 5 - As someone who has been dealing with TMS (mind-body) symptoms for the better part of the last year, I was both excited and kind of nervous about reading this book. If you have mind-body symptoms, you have probably tried just about EVERYTHING to rid yourself of them, and if you are like me, you have struggled to make sense of what's going on or make progress. Well meaning doctors may have scared you, or confused you, or you may have become somewhat of a doctor yourself via google - and in the end turned into a scared, in pain mess, who is now wondering if you will be able to get out of this. You might constantly live in the fear panic cycle, or maybe you have developed a pattern of 'fixing' or maybe you are just trying to figure out the 'why'. more
Do you suffer from chronic pain. Have you had numerous tests, lab work, CT scans, MRIs, and doctors have said there is structurally nothing wrong with you. Does your pain consume your thoughts- when you feel a twinge of pain, do you obsess over whether or not it's going to get worse. Has it significantly impacted your quality of life to the point of disability. Then this book will absolutely change your life. more
I LOVED this. Total. Gamechanger. I’ve been struggling with back pain for 18 months now. I’ve given all my money to a whole bunch of specialists. more
Dr. Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv in their compelling book “Way Out”, introduce the concept of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a radical approach to eliminating chronic pain instead of just managing the discomfiture by taking recourse to conventional remedies such as surgeries, physiotherapy and opioids intake. Complementing their contentions with real life examples and empirical analyses. Gordon and Ziv argue that it is not a mere pipe dream for billions of sufferers across the globe to rid themselves from the vice like grip of chronic pain. Dr. more
Groundbreaking book. I came across this through the Curable App, which I’m also really enjoying. This book is a practical guide to pain reprocessing therapy. When pain becomes chronic, it is the result of your brain getting good at sending pain signals even when you’re body has healed. The good news is that all pain originates in the brain, which means you can retrain your brain into no longer sending frequent pain signals and break free of the pain-fear cycle. more
Ostensibly a new approach to pain treatment, but overall it's a flimsy, superficial, reductionist outlook on chronic severe pain, characterizing it as a mistake made by the brain, in response to a person's fear & bad thinking habits. The author, a purported former chronic pain sufferer, & adherent to his own pain-management procedures, ought to command authority & credibility; but his writing-style is infused w/so many goofy, cornball jokes, that it's hard to take him seriously. Midway thru the book (after a lame reference to the sideshow-act "Dr Phil"), we encounter an episode where the author tells of how he bolted out of a college seminar one day, driving on impulse from the West Coast to NYC to meet Lorne Michaels, expecting to get hired on-the-spot as a cast member of SNL (. ). ('scuse me. more
This was recommended to be by an excellent pain psychologist as part of my treatment program after lots of useless appointments with lots of health professionals with (what felt like) no hope. I read this (or rather listened to it) in 2 days. I immediately felt hopeful and also laughed out loud more than a few times. Nerve pain (especially with no known physical cause) is terrifying. The author explained the recent science and brought it to life from someone who clearly lived the (suffering)experience. more
Highly recommend for chronic pain. Thanks to the way this book is written and my previous experience with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and reframing techniques, I was able to immediately reduce my chronic pain. Full review on Storygraph https://app. thestorygraph. com/books/9. more
I will be coming back to this a lot over the coming months. The hope and optimism I have been feeling since starting in this new direction have been a very welcome breath of fresh air. Now to keep doing the work. more
I find this absurdly light and quick read difficult to review. It's a very lean book and doesn't go in for much beyond a LOT of testimonials — which give it a bit of an infomercial/latest craze flavour. I'll admit to following Gordon's Instagram page, and while the snippets of info are great for that limited focus, it doesn't translate well into a compelling, cohesive, or comprehensive book. As I read in another's accurate review, this book could have, and indeed should have, been a pamphlet advertising his services. more
Good. Sober. Empowering. A brief guide to overcoming chronic “neuroplastic” pain. Well written and theoretically sound. more
While there are some reasonable ideas in this book that may be helpful in reducing and managing chronic pain, the book is a bit too chatty and fluffy for my liking. It's already a pretty short book at 150 pages but its significant content could have been effectively reduced to a 15-page pamphlet. It shares this flaw with your typical self-help book. That said, it is certainly worth pursuing this approach as an alternative to drugs and surgery. While I remain skeptical of its success rate, it does seem to make some sense that in some cases retraining your brain might be effective. more
The fibromyalgia diagnosis I received over a decade ago, thinking there was no cure, I just couldn't accept living like that for the rest of my life. I kept thinking, if the pain could be switched on such as it was, then surely there must be a way to switch it off again. And then I found this book and everything made sense. I was learning about mindfulness and emotions and all that at the same time, which I think really helped cement it all. Because it honest-to-goodness worked. more
The only topic I wish the authors had touched on is the difficulty feeling safe when current events/economic, social and political climates weigh heavily: a pandemic, cost of living, instability in work and housing etc. How can we send messages of safety to our brains when we may, at any moment, need to find another place to live; when we may not know where we will be working in a month or three months or six months; when we may not know where our next pay check/meal is coming from. Otherwise, the book is worthwhile for anyone experiencing chronic pain. more
I won't spend too much time writing about this book, because it requires the reader to embrace the concept on their own. I wish it had been longer with more scientific info. more
Edit: retroactively changing this to a 4 because honestly I have started trying this technique and it is working to reduce my pain. Knock on wood. —Pretty interesting take on chronic pain as neuroplastic pain: overly worn neural pathways from originally legitimate physical triggers that have become easily triggered to create mentally simulated pain. It feels real but it isn’t. I like the concept, and the solution is basically to gaslight yourself out of pain. more
This book is a MIRACLE for chronic pain sufferers. I want to wrap it up in my arms and take it ballroom dancing. 🥰🥰🥰 . more
There was a lot that I liked about this book. But I disagree with it's major premise, that chronic pain can be entirely cured because in the vast majority of cases the pain is due to signals in the brain, not something wrong in the body. The author states that chronic pain is real, but "the pain is due to your brain making a mistake and. your body is fine. " So once you convince yourself of "safety," you can go about re-wiring your brain. more
(Audiobook) Started this book skeptically. Heard about the author because of an article in the Washington Post about the Pain Psychology Center and their ways of treating chronic pain. I have been dealing with some pretty gnarly issues for the past couple of years and felt like there’s not a lot left I can do to get back to the active life I enjoyed. An hour into the book my pain started to drift away as I learned how neuroplastic pain enters the body. My pain has not gone away altogether in a week, btw, however, when the pain comes now, I am using the techniques from the book to minimize the pain, and it’s absolutely working. more
Why do I recommend this book. As a chronic pain patient for over 24 years, I searched high and low for relief from unrelenting fibromyalgia. I consulted doctors of all kinds, underwent all sorts of expensive medical procedures, followed strict diets and protocols and tried almost every pill on the market. Some helped temporarily, but none gave me lasting relief. And then I discovered mind/body medicine. more
A quick, interesting, and easy read, written in a warm and lighthearted tone. However, this was one of those books where at the end I finished and said, "OK, so. wait: What am I supposed to do now. " If the book had just been telling a story, I would likely have rated it 4 stars, because it was pleasant and inspiring; however, I feel like books that introduce skills need to end with a summary, review, or outline of some sort about what the skills were and when/how to use them: This seems especially important when the book is written in a breezy, conversational style. In the absence of that, I'm left feeling like that I have to go back and and re-read the book and take my own notes: Something that it never would have occurred to me to do while I was reading it given the writing style (which felt more like a convo between friends. more
This is really a quick and easy read to think about pain differently and has helped me. more
Such a good book. I was unsure about buying it as I’ve also got the curable app and have listened to Gordon’s podcast but decided to buy it on my specialist’s encouragement (I have me/cfs). Gordon is so talented at communicating in a gentle, humorous way to deactivate your high alert and hyper vigilant brain. I definitely recommend the book even if you’ve consumed all the other content. I think it’s better than the app tbh. more
So grateful for this gem of a book that explains the causes and cures for chronic pain with solid scientific evidence, empathy, and humor. . more
Terrific book with just the best tone. So right on for this challenging subject / experience. Very very glad for this learning. more
I recently started seeing a therapist who specializes in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) and she recommended this book to me as an overview of the technique. This book is approachable and delves into how some chronic pain can be attributed to pain centers in your brain misfiring rather than external physical triggers. There are plenty of examples and different ways to approach the process in the book, and it provides a technical and practical background that forms a solid foundation to one’s PRT journey. I have already recommended this book to a handful of people in my life who also experience chronic pain. It is relatively short and easily digestible, but even someone skimming a chapter or two would gain a lot of insight in ways to recontextualize their chronic pain. more
I use the Curable app to manage chronic pain, which is how I learned about this book. There’s a little bit of overlap, but I learned a few new things and it was a great refresher for all the concepts I’ve already learned. Pain Reprocessing Therapy has improved my well-being dramatically; definitely recommend this book and their podcast and the app. . more