Is there hope?

One of the top five questions I am asked by email, about any condition, is simply Is there hope? The answer is nearly always the same …

Yes, there is hope! There’s never a guarantee, but there’s always hope, and recovery from most kinds of severe chronic pain is not only possible but fairly common. Unless you have a known serious aggravating factor — a major trauma, for instance — there is almost never any reason to fear that recovery from any chronic pain problem is impossible. For the same reason that pain can be absurdly persistent and out of proportion to any clear cause — because it is so brain-tuned — it also never loses the potential to finally shift and evaporate.

This thought was added to my Pain is Weird article, and probably should be in several other articles as well.