Breakthrough with Healing Chronic Pain — Dr. Howard Schubiner | Talks at Google
When Google invites a physician to speak at their headquarters about chronic pain, you pay attention. This talk by Dr. Howard Schubiner — co-researcher on the Boulder Back Pain Study, author of Unlearn Your Pain, and one of the leading clinical voices in the mind-body pain field — is one of the clearest, most compelling introductions to the neuroscience of chronic pain available anywhere. For free.
What Dr. Schubiner Covers
In this talk, Dr. Schubiner walks through what neuroscientists now understand about pain — and why it challenges everything most people, including most physicians, believe about it.
The core insight: pain isn't simply a signal from damaged tissue. A significant proportion of people living with chronic pain have no meaningful structural abnormalities at all. What they have are learned neural pathways — pain circuits in the brain that have been conditioned over time and can fire independently of any physical injury.
He reviews the current state of brain research and presents a new form of psychological treatment for fibromyalgia that has been shown in clinical trials to be superior to standard treatments — a finding that has profound implications not just for fibromyalgia, but for the full spectrum of chronic pain conditions.
Why This Talk Is Worth an Hour of Your Time
Dr. Schubiner has a rare gift: he's a rigorous scientist who speaks in plain language. Whether you're someone living with chronic pain, a skeptic who needs the research laid out clearly, or a loved one trying to understand what's happening to someone you care about — this talk meets you where you are.
This is the same framework, the same research, and the same clinical approach that underpins the work we do at Santa Barbara Chronic Pain Solutions.
