As Pain Awareness Month draws to a close this September, Dr. Eric Anderson, a neurologist and Chief Medical Officer of Lin Health, the virtual health care company based in Denver, CO, is drawing attention to a frequently misunderstood driver of chronic pain: the nervous system. Anderson argues that pain is not simply a signal from damaged tissue but a product of the brain and nervous system, and that in chronic cases, these systems can become oversensitive through a process called central sensitization.
“Pain is always produced by the brain and the nervous system,” Anderson said. “When someone hears ‘it’s in your brain,’ they often hear ‘it’s imaginary.’ But it’s quite the opposite. Your pain is very very real. It’s generated by real circuits in a real nervous system.” With chronic pain, he explained, that interpretation can contribute to the nervous system becoming oversensitive, so that even a light touch can trigger a pain response.
The implications of this understanding are significant. It opens up treatment avenues that go beyond treating the part of the body that hurts. “The nervous system is plastic, meaning that what it may have learned, it can unlearn,” Anderson said. “And I think that that is the most encouraging news in pain medicine right now.”
Lin Health’s brain-based approach is rooted in this science. The company’s virtual program matches each patient with a trained pain-recovery coach after a medical review, then provides a personalized plan incorporating evidence-based therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). These approaches aim to help patients understand how pain is processed, reduce fear and reactivity around symptoms, and develop new responses to pain.
Patients work with their coach through weekly live sessions and in-app messaging while accessing daily exercises via the Lin Health app, available on the Google Play Store for Android and the Apple App Store for iPhones.
The reported outcomes are notable: Lin Health says 92% of patients experience significant improvement in pain and function, pain intensity drops by 45%, and 59% of patients with medium-to-high pain reduce their pain to low or no pain after six months. The company holds a 4.8 rating on TrustPilot.com.
For the millions living with persistent pain, Anderson’s message during Pain Awareness Month is that understanding the distinction between where pain is felt and how it is processed could open the door to substantially more effective treatment. As Lin Health continues to scale its virtual care model, it aims to bridge a gap in traditional systems where nervous system-targeted interventions are often inaccessible due to high-touch requirements and limited clinical training.
