Nida’s audience seems to be primarily professionals but patients may gleam some gems from her experience.  She began as a young athletic trainer then became a traveling physical therapist.  After a high anxiety event, a friend recommended the Pain Reframe podcast which introduced her to newer neuroscience research concepts.  Subsequently before the pandemic, she took a MINDBODY course by Merrill and Schubiner to understand how emotions and stress affect physical symptoms.

During the pandemic she had to teach physical therapy to patients mostly remotely, but they got better because of her new insights about the mechanism of pain!   It was a game changer for her practice.  Six years later she met Dr. Kennedy in the Kaiser system in Oregon and subsequently joined her at Resilience Healthcare.   The concept she teaches now is ‘From Fear to Freedom’ concerning physical symptoms.  The neuroscience of pain truly makes sense through her lens of 20 years practice.

Changing from a biomedical perspective to include the neuroscience of pain was a game changer.   Pain intensity is related to the emotional aspect rather than the extent of tissue damage.  She encountered an example where a man had a violent encounter but sought no medical care.  Eight years later an Xray revealed a knife blade in his chest but he experienced no pain.  She also cites a contrasting incident where a worker was in excruciating pain when a nail pierced  his boot.  It looked serious but the nail did not injure his foot.   Damage does not equal pain.

She teaches the nocebo effect which involves a person’s reaction to opinions from others about possible practices or conditions that suggest illness or tissue damage.   Abnormal conditions on X-rays and MRI images are usually normal changes like wrinkles, rather than evidence of injury.  She also cites the placebo effect, and contagion theory that influence a person’s physical response to medical information and procedures, along with many examples.

Revealing concepts for her include the five F’s: fear, focus, flight, fix and frustration and their influence on the protective alarm system in their brain.

Another concept is the brain’s basic pattern of predictive coding, meaning it anticipates our experiences rather than reacting to them.  She explains the concept that most pains are real but not dangerous.

She discusses the nervous system’s response to non-chronic and chronic pain, and the ‘pain alarm’.

She discusses steps toward healing: the FIT Criteria; Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy; Visualizing; and Self-compassion.