Chronic Pain and the Epidemic of Clinical Misinformation
How dead-end treatments, shallow diagnostics & falsified medical studies overshadow the keys to our recovery
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“The process of self-healing is the privilege of every being. Self-healing is not a miracle, nor is self-healing a dramatization of the personality as though you could do something superior. Self-healing is a genuine process of the relationship between the physical and the infinite power of the soul.”
~ Harbhajan Singh ~
Self-Generated Wisdom and the Thesis to My Recovery
“Your body hasn’t been responsive to treatment and I don’t have any more therapy options to offer,” said my pain management doctor when I was 28-years-old, several years after being diagnosed with an extreme case of Repetitive Strain Injury (or RSI).
“I have no choice but to file your chronic pain condition as a permanent disability,” he said with his eyes glued to my chart. “I can keep prescribing meds and injections as you need them, but I’m afraid you aren’t going to recover from this, my dear.” The crushing prognosis tightened around my stiff neck like a noose.
By age 31 — almost seven years after my initial RSI flare-up — my body was so consumed by unrelenting pain, insomnia and compounding sickness that I started to seriously wonder if I’d be better off dead.
But then I got a better idea.
From the darkest, most delirious and exhausted rock-bottom I’ve ever experienced, a more hopeful “Plan B” began to emerge. Instead of hurling my broken body off the Golden Gate Bridge, I decided to scrap my hard-earned San Francisco design career in March of 2016, setting off to travel the world in search of healing and alternative answers to my growing health issues abroad.
In March of 2017 — a solid year after beginning my round-the-world healing journey — I woke up one morning to a body that was no longer plagued by mysterious pain. This was by no means a happy accident or an easy metamorphosis to manifest. The period of dedicated healing work between had been the most brutalizing, tumultuous, invaluable and informative 12 months of my life.
From a high-achieving workaholic to an unemployed drifter, I spent the bulk of those transformational days relearning how to live, care for and heal myself as though I were starting over from scratch. I explored dozens of healing modalities that focused on a broad range of goals, such as physical detoxing and tension release; overhauling my diet and relationship with food; deep emotional and psychological exploration; grief work and trauma release; reassessing my belief systems and outlook on life; learning how to tap into my body’s intuition and instinct centers to discern my own personal sense of truth and direction; experimenting with numerous mindfulness practices (that helped me to alleviate intense anxiety, a hyperactive nervous system, PTSD and long-term insomnia); along with developing a healthier connection with my natural environment, my fellow man and the higher power that I had long since abandoned (but had never abandoned me).
Since then, I’ve been playing the part of “nomadic digital expat” which consists of living a simple, unanchored, low-cost existence (primarily outside of the Western world); working periodic online freelance jobs (as the need or inspiration arises) while giving myself the flexibility and space I need to fully recalibrate, deepen and expand my connection with my unadulterated self, and secure a lasting recovery.
With the help of my fellow travelers and the humble group of Indigenous, shamanic and alternative healers I encountered overseas, I’ve come to discover that just about everything I’d previously been told about my “incurable illness” was dead-wrong. Meanwhile, the treatments, theories, strategies and recovery experiments I’ve explored far from home have helped to bring me back from the brink of psychological, physical and spiritual ruin. My time and re-education abroad have led me to some disturbing conclusions about the state of modern healthcare and the widespread medical malpractice of my motherland (especially when it comes to immeasurable illnesses like mine).
Dr. Relman, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, alleges that our medical industry has distorted both medicine and politics for their own financial gains:
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”
Relman is far from the only established medical professional to proclaim that Western medicine is held up by a long list of detrimental falsehoods. In 2009, Dr. Marcia Angell, another former editor in chief of NEJM wrote:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor.”
After a decade at the helm of my own personal health crisis, I’ve concluded what many credible voices of mainstream opposition have been struggling to convey (to an exploited and over-medicated masses) for generations. Through extensive reading, research and my own experiments and experiences in chronic pain recovery, a list of difficult truths now appear indisputable in my eyes:
- The Western medical system has largely been bought, built upon and paid for by a dangerously corrupt, powerful and morally bankrupt pharmaceutical industry.
- The theories and treatment methods of this system are widely dubious, ineffective and dangerously misleading — especially in relation to chronic pain and other immeasurable illnesses.
- The American public health system has created a culture that relies, almost religiously, upon prescription drug formulas as a first resort in treating a broad range of complex emotional and physical ailments that are more than just somatic. While some of these drugs deliver marginal or brief symptom relief, the perception of relief, or alter the patients’ state of being in some temporary way, they often do not address the core or holistic causes that brought these issues about in the first place.
- “Big pharma” and the U.S. medical establishment has a vested interest in keeping us collectively confused, stupefied and belly-up with sickness and disease, feeling like we have no choice but to chronically depend on drugs that mask symptoms rather than eradicate their root causes.
While there are notably many modern medical achievements that have improved the longevity and quality of life for people in need, our institutionalized approach to “soft-sicknesses” (illnesses that are more difficult to outwardly detect and measure with the tools and technologies of “hard science”) are beyond problematic. As Orwellian and alarmist as it may seem, I believe that the institutionalized manipulations, fraudulent theories and profit-driven misdirections harbored by pharmaceutical-funded science are a direct threat to the health, happiness and universal livelihood of the human race itself.
In an era of consumer review systems, social media movements and unparalleled online human connection, it is time for the specialists and healers who’ve been working outside this untrustworthy system — and the common citizens among us to who have found lasting recovery, relief and alternative answers of their own — to speak out in a bigger, bolder way. Regardless of where we are in our individual recovery or re-education process, the need for a new dialogue around chronic illness is essential to our collective wellbeing and the survival of an increasingly dysfunctional, sick and struggling global civilization.
Now is the time for us to shine a light on a better way forward, so we stand a chance of guiding one another out of the darkness, dis-ease and the unbearable collective suffering that’s infiltrating our world.
A Global Epidemic of Long-Term Pain
In the United States alone, chronic pain costs an estimated $635 billion every year for the care and lost productivity of over 100 million patients (which makes up almost a third of the country’s population). These staggering numbers make it the most expensive health epidemic of all time, and by a long shot. In 1986, chronic pain comparatively only cost the U.S. $56 billion, meaning there has been a 1,034% increase in our national pain budget over the course of the last 30 years. It’s hard to imagine, but there are more people in the U.S. strapped with chronic pain than those who have diabetes (21 million), cancer (14 million) and heart disease (28 million) combined.
On a global scale, 1.5 billion people (and counting) are said to be suffering with chronic pain. As a result of this groundswell in prolonged pain cases, the global economy is hemorrhaging from dramatic increases in medical costs, ballooning health care premiums, an avalanche of workers compensation and disability claims, and sharp reductions in overall labor productivity. The worldwide effects of the chronic pain epidemic are nothing short of appalling. An article from a European health journal states:
“Chronic pain is costly not only because it requires medical treatment and complicates treatment for other conditions, but because it undermines the ability to lead a productive working and social life, placing a substantial burden on individuals, employers, health care systems and societies in general.”
Although the population of chronic pain patients (or CPPs) are rapidly multiplying, this expanding community is lacking in effective, curative treatment options and the kind of research funding needed to develop a deeper, more accurate understanding of their plight. According to a 2016 report, the U.S. medical system is focused on rehabilitation and pain management efforts rather than seeking to reveal a viable cure. However, the quality of life for the average pain patient is on the nose-diving decline, despite the billions being spent on drug trials, pain management modalities and other physically focused procedures (that are overwhelmingly inadequate at producing lasting results).
The Flawed Practices & Quick Fixes that Are Keeping Us Sick
The booming, multi-billion dollar pain management industry is largely misleading and failing it’s patients; for many from start to finish. For large numbers of CPPs, initial reports of pain are often dismissed by primary care physicians and even pain specialists (especially when those patients are women), leaving individuals mis- or under-diagnosed while their opportunities for early intervention expire. Once a diagnosis has finally been made, many patients are then funneled through a rotation of physiotherapies while being prescribed habit-forming, dangerous drugs that temporarily numb out or distract them from their traveling circus of aches and pains, but do arguably nothing to remedy their underlying cause.
Numerous new studies show that both manual therapies and painkiller treatment approaches are only marginally more effective in relieving pain than a placebo or over-the-counter pill, with virtually no proof that these tactics contribute to long-term recovery. Ten-time New York Times best selling author Dr. Mark Hayman compares the all-too-common act of prescribing more medication (while an underlying illness is perpetuated) to “taking the batteries out of a smoke detector instead of trying to find the fire.”
Interventional Pain Physician, Scientist and Author Peter Staats MD elaborates on the prescription drug crisis in an article for the Huffington Post: “Our most prolific answer to treating pain is opioids, a low-cost narcotic that has very limited long-term efficacy data, and is known to cause abuse, addiction and death.”
A Doctor Prescribed Addiction Crisis
Reports show that drugs like OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin and even muscle relaxers like Flexeril don’t live up to their reputations as fail-safe pain relievers, but they do come with a long list of extreme risks and side effects. These stopgap pharmaceutical remedies are shown to make an already psychologically vulnerable group of people more susceptible to addiction and mental health crisis, while increasing the likelihood that they may join our nation’s skyrocketing death toll from opioid overdose.
Despite the serious shortcomings and risks associated with opioids, chronic pain patients are often the first (and the loudest) voices to protest government restriction on this life-threatening group of legalized narcotics.
The term “opioid” refers to several low-cost, synthetic variations of “opiates,” such as opium and heroin, that are derived from the poppy plant. While the “war on drugs” was being waged in America’s city centers — imprisoning countless street narcotic users and dealers over the course of the last fifty years — licensed physicians have essentially been handing out prescriptions for cheap, synthetic heroin pills since the late 90s with increasing frequency and gusto (while racking up enormous financial and professional gains).
According to an article from The Recovery Village, both opiates and opioids have incredibly powerful, intoxicating effects. When someone takes a dosage from either drug class, these chemicals effectively flood the brain with dopamine — the neurotransmitter responsible for the regulation of pleasure — which over-stimulates the brain’s reward system in a way that would rarely (if ever) occur naturally.
The result is a powerful, euphoric high that temporarily distracts and prohibits the person from feeling any pre-existing sensations of pain. But beneath this short-lived reprieve that masks the user’s discomfort, their chronic pain symptoms and its underlying causes all still very much exist. Thus, when the effects of the drug wear off, the desire to replicate this artificial feel-good sensation can be both overwhelming and immediate, especially for those who are used to living in a world marked by extreme pain and suffering.
Considering the Source and Being Open to Drug-Free Alternatives
My point is not to judge, shame or scare CPPs who turn to pharmaceuticals or other conventional methods for relief. I realize that despite the controversial nature of opioid use (and the media frenzy around their misuse), that some chronic pain patients do manage to use their prescriptions responsibly as a means for getting through their worst bouts of pain, and many others wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the science-based discoveries of modern medicine.
I’m not a medical practitioner, a licensed healer, or a medical expert qualified to give advise about anyone else’s health problems. I’m not suggesting that anyone abandon or ignore the advise of modern medicine completely, but instead that they think critically about the recommendations they receive and be willing to look beyond determinations of institutionalized medicine.
While all of our bodies, cases and life circumstances are unique, I challenge other’s with insidious pain to leave no stone unturned in the often difficult-to-solve mysteries of chronic pain recovery. I implore them to experiment with methods from the soft-sciences; holistic and alternative healing techniques; natural, herbal remedies; and psychological, trauma-release therapies. I urge them to consider time-tested wisdom from Eastern medicine or ancient Indigenous traditions and look into the multiplicity of viable mind-body-soul recovery strategies. All of these practices work outside the physically focused confines of Western medicine — exploring the role that the mind, the emotions, the energetic body, the soul and other less tangible factors may be playing in our dis-ease.
While I never personally explored the opioid route because of my genetic predisposition for addiction, I did spend the better part of a decade exploring other physiological, ergonomical, and pharmaceutical treatment options that often helped to reduce or dull my pain levels at first, but none with sustained results. Had I not eventually been willing to move beyond my pain specialist’s dismal prediction for my future — who claimed my disability was permanent, that my two inexplicable pain conditions were in no way connected, and that taking an extended hiatus from work would not improve my condition — I would likely no longer be here.
The Psychological Aspects of Chronic Pain & Mysterious Illness
With or without opioid prescriptions, most CPPs live in a prolonged state of mental and physical torment that subsequently leads to insomnia, advanced fatigue and a domino-effect of other compounding physical and psychological problems. Meanwhile, insurance providers tend to halt or dramatically reduce coverage of their patients’ care if pain symptoms cease to improve over the course of a few years. Many are labeled “permanently disabled” like I was, a defeatist prognosis that can catapult a person into an even deeper state of hopelessness and mental agony (which can actually bolster the strength and staying power of their pain).
These demoralizing circumstances can take a major toll on that person’s general health, quality of life, economic work standing, emotional well-being, as well as their social and family lives. All aspects of life can be dramatically impacted by the pain, and as hope for recovery becomes more fleeting, symptoms tend to get progressively worse over time.
To the detriment of most who suffering with chronic pain in the U.S., many of the theories that can lead us to long-term recovery do not fit within the narrow clinical mindset that currently rules our healthcare system. While Western medicine focuses primarily on the physical symptoms and the material aspects of these pain conditions, a whole host of other doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists swear by an alternative school of thought where the human mind and body are inextricably linked. These practitioners believe that the “mind-body (or mindbody) connection” must first be recognized if we ever hope to liberate CPPs from their suffering.
Dr. John E. Sarno — who dedicated his career to the study and practice of drug-free chronic pain rehabilitation methods — coined and elaborated on this connection in his 1998 New York Times Bestseller *The Mindbody Prescription:
“Medicine has yet to acknowledge [that] strong emotions induce physical reactions. Without that knowledge the profession is diagnostically at sea and the epidemic continues.”
Dr. Sarno passed away at 93-years-old in 2017 — just before the release of “All the Rage (Saved by Sarno),” a documentary film about his work and theories. Sarno’s career in medicine dates all the way back to the 1960s. Since the 1980s, he sold over a million copies from his anthology of books about the psychological origins of chronic illness, but his findings have still largely been ignored by the mainstream medical community (despite the thousands who claim to have been cured by reading his books, attending his lectures and using his methods).
According to filmmaker Michael Galinsky, co-director of All the Rage, there’s been tension between the weight that’s given to the mind and the focus that’s given to the body in science and medicine for centuries. Where Sigmund Freud and his colleagues brought the mind-body connection back to the center of medical studies in the late 1800s, this holistic perspective fell out of vogue again in the 1950s, when “the tools of science became increasingly technical and mechanical,” Galinsky explains. “The role of the mind, which was much harder to study using the scientific method, became increasingly ignored.”
Author Gabor Maté describes this hazardous trend in his 2003 book, *When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection:
“We attempt to understand the body in isolation from the mind… We want to describe human beings — healthy or otherwise — as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, love and die. These are built-in, hidden biases of the medical orthodoxy that most physicians absorb during their training and carry into their practice.”
With the help of political lobbyists, large-scale marketing efforts and the profit-driven biases of the public media, our cultural affinity for the theories and conclusions of the natural (or “hard”) sciences over the findings of psychology and other social (or “soft”) sciences has grown stronger over the last three decades. Yet, more and more, the validity of many long-standing “hard science” theories — that helped to shape the fabric of our current healthcare industry and its medical practices — are now being called into serious question.
Although these critiques and alternative theories don’t always find their way into the public discourse, numerous practitioners have expressed strong objections to some of the most commonly accepted medical theories of our time. If what they say is true, than much of the rhetoric that props up our multi-billion dollar chronic pain industry — where the mechanisms of the body are often examined, assessed, diagnosed and treated without considering the role of the mind — are weak, misleading and even dangerous.
“Mind and body are inseparable,” writes Maté, “illness and health cannot be understood in isolation from the life histories, social context, and emotional patterns of human beings… much new information has accumulated to support this perspective.”
Dr. Andrea Leonard-Segal said she always questioned the over-reliance on physical treatment modalities in combating chronic pain. “But I was doing it because it was recommended,” she said in All the Rage. Her doubts about the effectiveness of these treatments didn’t go away, so she started to review the studies that had brought these methods into mainstream medicine:
“The literature that was written and published in medical journals that supported our using these modalities really was exceedingly weak… The studies were small, they were not well designed. This firm ground upon which we were basing our recommendations for patients was not very firm indeed.”
A Pharmacopoeia of False Studies & Drug Trial Deceptions
Since the 1950s, drug companies have successfully campaigned for and promoted a pharmacopoeia of prescription drug remedies as the leading answer to our growing list of wellness problems, and these strategically marketed pill-shaped solutions have been widely embraced by doctors across the U.S. healthcare industry. Despite big pharma’s inflated promises (and their ballooning profit margins), both the chronic pain and mental health crises continue to deteriorate the fabric of our society at rapidly growing speeds.
Author Edmund S. Higgins notes that even though more people are taking anti-depressant medications than ever before, progress against mental illness seems to have stalled out and even slid backwards in the last 20 years.“Suicide rates have increased to a 30-year high. Substance abuse, particularly of opiates, has become epidemic. Disability awards for mental disorders have dramatically increased since 1980, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is struggling to keep up with the surge in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” he wrote in an article for Scientific America.
According to numerous theorists and researchers, the widespread belief that mental disorders, like depression and anxiety, are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain is actually an unfounded myth. Bestselling author Dr. Mercola explains that this theory was first proposed by scientists in the 1960s and steadily gained popularity in the decades following — despite the lack of concrete evidence to prove it’s worth — as the methods of psychoanalysis fell out of favor and physical and biological theories became more in-vogue.
Steve Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, elaborates on the sudden popularity of the chemical imbalance concept:
“It’s not hard to see why the theory caught on… The focus on a clear biological cause for depression gave practicing physicians an easily understandable theory to tell patients about how their disease was being treated.”
According to therapist and LCSW Mark Ruffalo, who writes for Psychology Today, these overly simplistic and reductionist explanations of much a more complicated psychological phenomena were then strategically advertised to the public and the psychiatric mainstream in the late 1980s, by none-other than the pharmaceutical company that created the first antidepressant drug. “Eli Lilly advanced the chemical imbalance theory as a marketing scheme to sell their new drug Prozac,” Ruffalo said.
Rage Against the “American Dream”
Recent studies (which were funded independent of big pharma) show that marginalized social groups — such as women, the poor and people with less education — are not only more likely to develop chronic illnesses, but often experience much higher pain levels than non-marginalized individuals.
Independent research also implies that there’s a connection between the explosion of chronic pain and the widening of our country’s the wealth gap. “People who have significant economic anxiety, or locate themselves on a lower ‘rung’ of perceived affluence are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and chronic pain,” explains psychologist Keith Payne, author of *The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live and Die.
According to Dr. Sarno, there are deep-seated, psychological reasons for this statistical connection between chronic pain and economics. “Poor people are angry,” Dr. Sarno explained at a Senate Committee Meeting in 2011. “They’re furious as a matter of fact, at what society has allowed to happen, and that fury will evoke physical symptomology as a defense against the rage.”
Sarno and Maté both claim that the vast majority of chronic physical disorders are rooted in the subconscious mind. Both expert physicians assert that antidepressant drugs eliminate the symptoms of a mental health condition without identifying or reconciling with its cause, which can have disastrous effects for some people. They believe that when negative feelings and emotions are repressed or artificially removed — either through disassociation or with the help of medication — those feelings do not actually disappear but are then relegated to the subconscious realm.
The repression of emotions can effectively “disorganize and confuse our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors,” explained Maté. Such theories insinuate that Western society’s lack of emotional literacy — and our dependence on both recreational and prescription substances to help us escape extreme or uncomfortable feelings — are major factors in what’s making and keeping so many people chronically ill (i.e. that emotional repression is the best friend of chronic pain).
Author and celebrity doctor Andrew Weil comments on the medical system’s lopsided tendency to focus on the physical in All the Rage:
“Medical doctors want magic bullets. They want to deal with physical systems, they want treatments that have specific actions on physical systems. They don’t want to deal with all the uncertainty and strangeness of the emotional world and the gauziness of mind-body interactions. I think the only way this will change is through the collapse of the conventional health care system as these expenses spiral out of control… Doctors will be forced to look for low-tech methods of managing common conditions, and mind-body interventions are certainly low-cost, low-tech interventions.”
According to Dr. Dennis Turk, editor of the Clinical Journal of Pain, it isn’t just the medical community who is responsible for this massive misdirection and over-reliance on physical remedies to cope with all types of sickness and pain:
“We’ve grown up as a society expecting that health care can do anything for us. If I told you I’m going to teach you some relaxation and some exercises versus I can give you a pill; it takes ten seconds to take a pill, an hour a day to do exercises and relax… Let’s not just blame the health care system, let’s also blame the public for what they want from the health care system.”
“It is a puzzlement to me how a doctor who produces dramatic beneficial results for his patients at little or no cost could be considered controversial whereas practitioners of costly, ineffectual so-called mainstream medicine are somehow regarded as more legitimate,” writes Edward Siedle, a contributing writer for Forbes Magazine.
“It is a sensitive matter to raise the possibility that the way people have been conditioned to live their lives may contribute to their illness,” said Maté in *When The Body Says No.
As elaborated on by Maté in All the Rage, the widespread rejection of mind-body connection theories goes well beyond our medical discourse. “In our society we confuse responsibility with blame.”
“To say that certain emotional and behavioral patterns that you have have contributed significantly to the onset of your illness does not mean that you’ll be blamed for it. Especially when you look at chronic pain, it almost always occurs in a context of somebody’s life who had significant childhood loss or trauma. And that then entrains a whole set of stress reducing reactions and patterns that culminate in chronic pain later on. What a great opportunity for learning and transformation, but over and over again we just try to deal with the symptom rather than the underlying problem. We will miss a great opportunity to help liberate people.”
Laura Kiesel describes the connection between chronic pain and childhood trauma in a 2018 article from Harvard Medical School:
“When we are threatened, our bodies have what is called a stress response, which prepares our bodies to fight or flee. However, when this response remains highly activated in a child for an extended period of time without the calming influence of a supportive parent or adult figure, toxic stress occurs and can damage crucial neural connections in the developing brain. According to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, the impacts of experiencing repeated incidents of toxic stress as a child ‘…persist far into adulthood, and lead to lifelong impairments in both physical and mental health.’”
It may be difficult to believe — especially for those who have been battling intense pain for years with little semblance of relief — but many people with extreme cases of debilitating pain have actually seen overnight results after picking up one of Sarno’s books (myself included). A website called Thank You, Dr. Sarno, is an ongoing testament to this fact. A letter to Dr. Sarno from a woman named Tricia demonstrates just that:
“Five years ago, I was a 24 year old woman that had given up on life after battling immense pain for over a decade. I had vowed to take my own life at the end of that year until I was given a gift that would change my life forever. Someone had known of my pain and gave me your book. Within a month I was pain free and by the end of that year I was able to celebrate my life and the hope that I had gained instead of giving up.”
Learning How to Play the Long Game
For some — like myself and the chronic-pain-suffering documentarian Michael Galinsky (who’s story is featured in All the Rage) — the road to full recovery can be long, perplexing and laborious. Despite the stubborn nature of our cases, I surmise that the poignant truth of Sarno’s mind-body theories remain no less relevant to both our recovery journeys.
When it comes to chronic illness, it may take months or even years to free a person from their prolonged prison of debilitating aches and pains. Sarno’s approach to tackling chronic illness (along with the methods of many other holistic practitioners) will often challenge CPPs to turn inward instead of outward, placing the onus more heavily on the shoulders of the patient rather than the practitioner to resolve the complicated puzzle of their pain. This sometimes slow and steady journey towards genuine wellness isn’t lined with the hollow, high reaching promises of any silver bullet pill or placebo surgical intervention. It may require a quantum leap of dramatic change, followed by sustaining trust and dedication to a gradual process of complete self re-evaluation and transformation.
After over a decade fighting my own chronic pain battles (against not just one mysterious pain condition, but two), I’ve finally managed to regain control over my body, first and foremost, by learning how to listen to my own personal sense of what’s true and what’s false. Ready to take on the next natural phase of my lifelong recovery journey by becoming of greater service to others, I feel called to pursue a new professional path as a self-directed filmmaker, social activist, and an advocate for self-healing and societal reformation.
Making myself a public resource to those still suffering with seemingly inexplicable sickness, long-term pain or any other disease brought on by extreme psychological turmoil, metaphysical misalignment or suppression of inner truth, I recently created The Human Beta Test. Harnessing the power of inner truth and self-generated wisdom, “Beta” is an approach to self-discovery, spiritual growth and fulfillment; a forum and education platform designed to help individuals pave the path to freedom, vitality and the kind of personal clarity that will protect participants from exploitation and undue suffering in their lives.
Once a Rust-Belt tomboy with an unlikely American dream, Cassandra worked as a competitive designer in San Francisco for seven years (for clients like Pixar, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Amazon and Google) before scrapping it all to pursue a Hail-Mary healing journey abroad. She now lives the life of a world-traveling freelancer, budding filmmaker and vocal advocate for social change. Her writing about gender equality, chronic pain, alternative healing and travel can be found on The Trigger Point Chronicles; her musings and methods for meditation and self-actualization can be found on Living BETA facebook page; and you can see her travel images on Instagram @cassandra.smolcic.
