09/08/2026
For years, she’d been told the compression in her spine explained the pain shooting down her LEFT side.
The scans looked convincing enough, so why question it?
Then one morning the left side felt... fine. And the RIGHT side was killing her.
Same kind of pain, wrong side.
She mentioned it to her doctor, who looked at the scan again and asked a ridiculously simple question:
“If the compression hasn’t moved, why did the pain?” 🤯
That question sent her down a rabbit hole.
Because structural changes on scans are incredibly common, including in people who have NO pain. And chronic pain doesn’t always behave the way we’d expect an injury to behave.
It moves, comes and goes, flares during stress and disappears on vacation. Sometimes it even switches sides for no apparent physical reason at all.
None of that makes the pain imaginary!
It can be a clue that the brain and nervous system have become overprotective and are producing REAL pain in response to perceived danger rather than ongoing tissue damage.
For her, that distinction changed everything. Instead of being terrified of her spine, she started getting curious about the pain.
This eventually led her to the work of Dr. John Sarno, the longtime NYU rehabilitation physician who became famous for questioning whether abnormalities on MRIs were really causing many cases of chronic pain.
And THAT was the beginning of getting her life back.
🤔 Has YOUR pain ever switched sides, moved somewhere completely different, or vanished for no logical reason? Tell me below, and add HEAL if you want my video explaining how I discovered why I had chronic pain—and how I healed it. ❤️🩹