We feel your pain

If you didn't watch the 1992 Olympic Men's 400m semi-final when it happened, you may have seen it since. A British record-holder named Derek Redmond was on target to medal when, with more than half the race to go, he tore his hamstring. Writhing in pain he continued, refusing help until his father joined him through the finish, creating one of the most profound moments in Olympic history.

If you're like us, you watched feeling inspired but also wincing. Even if you've never torn your hamstring, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that you understand Derek's pain. In a certain sense, you can feel it.

That's because we all know pain. From the facial expressions it elicits to its accompanying swelling or discoloration, almost everything about the experience of pain tells us that it occurs to each of us in roughly the same way.

If asked how Derek's pain happened, you might offer its common-sense explanation: Derek experienced pain because, after damaging his hamstring, his nerves told his brain about the damage, which his brain translated into pain. Pain, in other words, is an almost mechanical response to injury. This we'll call the common-sense understanding of pain.

The common-sense understanding of pain has been with us for centuries, if not longer. It tells us that we experience pain in proportion to how injured we are and that, if we have pain, it's because there's something physically wrong.

From our health insurers down through fringe internet therapies, the common-sense understanding of pain has shaped pain's treatment. But despite its widespread popularity and deep influence on our healthcare system, you might be surprised to hear that there's abundant scientific evidence that the common-sense understanding of pain falls devastatingly short.

Pain is more than meets the thigh

There's something wrong with our common-sense explanation for Derek's pain. For one, it wasn't until seconds after he tore his hamstring that he felt any pain at all. Not to mention, minutes after his injury he stood winceless alongside his father, answering interview questions. We doubt that observations like these strike you as controversial. Think for a second about your own experience with pain—whether an excruciating step atop a harmless lego or a severe but initially painless motor vehicle injury, people commonly report wonky experiences with pain.

This wonkiness is important. It's what gave rise to a newer understanding of pain, one that's just now reaching wide scientific consensus. This understanding sees Derek's pain not as the simple result of injury, but as something that his brain's constructed based on a number of factors beyond his injury. We'll call this the modern understanding of pain.

The modern understanding of pain, whose seeds date back to the 1960s, allows for a broader spectrum of experiences with pain. For one, it suggests that pain is not the simple result of injury, but is instead a learned phenomenon that's influenced by a much more diverse set of factors. It suggests that the relationship between pain and injury is often tenuous—and that, when we do have pain, it may not be the result of something that's strictly physical. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests new methods for getting ourselves out of pain.

New ways out

Despite reaching broad scientific consensus, this new understanding of pain has yet to make its way into mainstream care. And it's no wonder. It's contributed not just to a redefinition of the word "pain", but to a redefinition of the entire model we use to understand our health. For systemic reasons, it takes time for a shift this bedrock to reach our bedrooms.

But this lag has left many people, ourselves included, with a hodgepodge of ineffective, short-term, or dependence-inducing treatments and, ultimately, unnecessary pain. So over the last 2 years, we've steeped ourselves in the research and, for the first time in years—and in some surprising ways—find ourselves feeling better.

Which brings us to Function.

You can think of Function as the result of these last 2 years of research into pain and its treatment, bundled into its most accessible format and designed to evolve alongside the latest in pain research. We started with our own pain before expanding to serve an important fraction of other people: those with persistent low back pain. And after seeing some heartwarming results among our first set of members, we're ready to share the program more broadly.

If you don't qualify but remain interested in Function and in this new science of pain, you can follow along by signing up for our monthly newsletter, below.

Thanks for reading.