PRT Pain reprocessing

Gorog Health offers Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). PRT focuses on altering the brain's response to pain signals and addressing the underlying psychological factors contributing to pain. Discover how PRT at Gorog Health can help you retrain your brain, alleviate pain, and improve your overall well-being.

What is this type of therapy?

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a system of psychological techniques that retrains the brain to accurately interpret and respond to signals from the body, breaking and aiming to eliminate the cycle of chronic pain. Psychological treatment focused on changing beliefs about the causes and threat value of primary chronic back pain may provide substantial and durable pain relief. 

It builds on and extends existing psychological treatment models such as Cognitive-behavioral, Acceptance-based, and Mindfulness-based  interventions typically aim to improve the functioning  by decreasing pain catastrophizing, enhancing pain coping  or acceptance, and promoting engagement in valued life  activities. Exposure-based treatments share with PRT  an emphasis that painful activities are not injurious,  but do not emphasize reappraising pain sensations and reattributing  the causes of pain.

Leading psychological interventions for pain typically present the causes of pain as multifaceted and aim primarily to improve functioning and secondarily to reduce pain. PRT emphasizes that the brain actively constructs primary chronic pain in the absence of tissue damage and that reappraising the causes and threat value of pain can reduce or eliminate it.

Recent neuroscience breakthroughs show that most chronic pain results from the brain misinterpreting safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous.  

What are the steps?

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) has five main components: 

  1. education about the brain origins and reversibility of pain, 
  2. gathering and reinforcing personalized evidence for the brain origins and reversibility of pain, 
  3. attending to and appraising pain sensations through a lens of safety, 
  4. addressing other emotional threats, and 
  5. gravitating to positive feelings and sensations. 

We provide here a brief overview of PRT, and a PRT manual is forthcoming (Gordon & Ziv, forthcoming).

How does it work?

Research has found that the brain has the power to generate pain even in the absence of physical damage.  PRT treats Nociplastic, chronic pain as a false alarm, thereby allowing for enhanced interoceptive processes to guide the patients’ experience attending to and learning from their pain.  Inadvertently, complex beliefs about their pain and other psychosocial factors maintaining their pain will begin to shift their experience of having pain, ultimately reducing if not eliminating their pain.  

How does it help?

PRT targets primary (Nociplastic) pain by shifting patients’
beliefs about the causes and threat value of pain. It presents pain
as a reversible, brain-generated phenomenon not indicative of
peripheral pathology, but instead consistent with active inference and constructionist accounts of interoception and pain. Please let me know if you want me to include more explanations about these models or just add citations or links?

Who Does This Type of Therapy Make Sense For?
People with primary, nonspecific, Nociplastic, or centralized pain. Medical evaluations are necessary before exploring Pain Reprocessing Therapy.

What Makes Us Qualified for This Type of Treatment?
As clinical health psychologists, we are experts in understanding psychophysiological disorders. Additionally, I am a trained and certified a
PRT Clinician. (should we put a link here to their website where my name appears?)

What Can Patients Expect?
Patients can expect to learn about the complex neurophysiological processes that can lead to and maintain chronic pain. Moreso, patients will learn how the psychological processes that contributed to their experience having pain. After establishing care with Dr. Gorog’s team, patients will receive resources and assessment tools to help them better understand their relationship to their pain, so they can begin taking significant steps to reducing, if not eliminating their pain.

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About Dr. Nordberg

Dr. Nordberg specializes in insomnia, chronic pain management, and psychosocial support for chronic health conditions, including anxiety, depression, stress, grief, trauma, anger, ADHD, and life transitions. She uses research-backed methods like ACT, CBT, and MI, and is trained in biofeedback and relaxation training. With a background in clinical and health psychology, Dr. Nordberg offers holistic, collaborative care. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University and her B.A. from University of Southern California. Her extensive experience spans VA hospitals, academic medical centers, and community clinics.

She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Health Psychology at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center and is supervised by Dr. Gorog.

About Dr. Gorog

Founder of Gorog Health, Dr. Lauren Gorog is a licensed Clinical Health Psychologist specializing in a holistic approach to mental healthcare. With over 12 years of experience, Dr. Gorog integrates mindfulness-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), biofeedback, and somatic techniques like yoga and diaphragmatic breathing to address mental health issues and promote overall wellness. She offers tailored treatment for insomnia, chronic pain, eating disorders, and more, coordinating care with medical providers to enhance your well-being.

Dr. Gorog earned her Master’s in Clinical Counseling and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, which included extensive training and research. As a member of the Colorado Psychological Association, she remains current with ongoing professional development.