Chronic low back pain is one of the most common complaints I see in my Tel Aviv practice. Yet it remains widely misunderstood, by patients and clinicians alike. A recent discovery from the University of California San Diego sheds surprising new light: chronic low back pain may not only be a physical signal, it may become deeply embedded in the brain network associated with self-awareness and personal memory.
That changes quite a lot about how I approach this condition.
What the Researchers Found
Under normal circumstances, acute pain, the kind you feel after a fall or a cut, tends to reduce activity in what is called the Default Mode Network (DMN). This is the brain network that activates when you think about yourself, your memories, your sense of identity.
But in people with movement-triggered chronic low back pain, researchers observed the opposite: pain activates this network instead of quieting it.
In other words, every painful episode feeds into the circuits of personal memory and identity. Pain becomes, literally, a part of "who you are" in your own brain's perception.
Why This Discovery Matters Clinically
This helps explain why chronic pain is so resistant to purely mechanical treatments.
- The brain no longer processes pain as a simple alarm signal. It integrates it into the personal narrative.
- Patients can develop an anticipatory fear of movement, a phenomenon specialists call kinesiophobia.
- The identity of "a person in pain" can become entrenched and reinforce the nervous circuits of suffering.
This does not mean the pain is imagined or purely psychological in a dismissive sense. It is entirely real, neurobiologically grounded, but its mechanism goes well beyond a tissue injury.
What This Changes for Osteopathic Care
In my practice, I have long worked with the understanding that treating chronic low back pain is not simply a matter of adjusting a vertebra.
The body and the brain form one interconnected system. When I mobilise the structures of the lower back, fascia, sacroiliac joints, paraspinal muscles, I am also sending new sensory signals to the brain.
These proprioceptive inputs can, over time, interrupt the pain-memory-identity loop that these researchers describe. This is partly why osteopathic treatment so often brings not only physical relief, but also a sense of psychological ease.
I also encourage my patients to:
- Resume movement gradually, without waiting to feel "completely healed."
- Avoid defining themselves by their pain in everyday conversation.
- Consider complementary approaches such as mindfulness or cognitive therapy, which act directly on these same brain circuits.
Movement as a Safety Signal for the Brain
One of the most important messages I share with my chronic back pain patients is this: movement, even if it feels uncomfortable at first, is rarely dangerous.
The brain learns to associate movement with pain, and that association can be unlearned. Every time you move and the expected catastrophe does not occur, you send a safety signal to this brain network.
Osteopathy, by restoring mobility and reducing tissue tension, facilitates this relearning. It gives the body the sensory experience the brain needs to update its pain map.
My Approach in Tel Aviv
If you have been living with low back pain for weeks or months, I encourage you not to wait. The earlier we interrupt this brain cycle, the more effective the care.
Book a consultation at my Tel Aviv practice: together we will complete a thorough assessment and build a strategy tailored to your situation, so that pain stops being part of your identity and becomes what it should be: a temporary, manageable, and surmountable signal.
