Because persistent pain deserves its own treatment.

If you're reading this, chances are that you're familiar with lower back pain. There are 577 million of us who have it right now. For some, it comes with a simple explanation: we moved in a way we probably shouldn't have, which caused pain to come and eventually leave, as we healed.

But for over 100 million of us, our pain does not follow this natural order. Maybe our pain came and never left. Or maybe it left and returned weeks or months later. Or maybe the pain just set in and stayed for no obvious reason. In all of these cases pain has become what your doctor might call persistent or "chronic".

This unusual experience with pain has birthed a much wider set of explanations and an even wider set of treatments. But despite these growing lists of explanations and treatments, lower back pain is not getting better. And when we looked into it for our own sakes, we started to learn why:

• Pain's most common diagnoses do not sufficiently account for our experience of pain.
• Consequently, pain's most common treatments do not bear out in clinical research, and are sometimes even harmful.

We also learned that we weren't the only ones who misunderstood and mistreated our pain. For many governments and medical communities around the world, persistent lower back pain has become a public health crisis.

Understanding what's wrong

If you've seen a doctor for persistent pain, you may have been given one of many explanations ranging from postural or alignment issues to spinal abnormalities, like a herniated disk or spinal stenosis. But, perhaps surprisingly, 90% of all cases of lower back pain have no scientifically identifiable physical cause, and only 2.5% of cases can be attributed to a single, clear physical cause.

While this lack of physical clarity isn't a problem in and of itself, it becomes a problem when it causes us to misunderstand and mistreat our pain. And, in the case of persistent lower back pain, it has: many of our most common diagnoses have an at-best loose relationship to persistent lower back pain.

Learn what the research says about the diagnoses you know:

Unsurprisingly, when we treat pain based on misguided assumptions about what's causing it, we get weak and sometimes even harmful results. Here's just a sample of over-used and often-misguided responses to persistent lower back pain:

It's no exaggeration to say that misunderstanding persistent pain has led to entire industries of ineffective, short-term, and dependence-inducing treatments. Using the status quo, lower back pain remains the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But we can do better. Thanks to the hard work of pain scientists and clinicians, we already possess a more accurate understanding of persistent pain—one that offers a much clearer path to relief.

Where we go from here

If you take one thing away from this article, take this: the physical state of your body is only one factor in your experience of pain.

Long-term relief starts when you internalize this fact.

For centuries, we thought that pain was the raw information sent from our tissues to our brains. We now know that this raw information—what scientists call nociception—is just one of many pieces of information that our brains use to construct our experience of pain.

This more complex understanding of pain is what explains phenomena like phantom limb pain and stress-induced analgesia, but is true for every instance of pain.

When things work well, your pain is an important and appropriately accurate signal for you—suggesting, perhaps, that you may want to take your hand off of that hot stove. But when things are not working well—as is the case for 100+ million of us—then understanding the other things that influence your pain can mean the difference between finding relief and not.

Here is what we *know* about these other factors:

These are just a few of the more concrete factors that the scientific community has been able to study enough to draw conclusions on, but the broad consensus within the pain science community is that we can influence our experience of pain by addressing all of its causes—including those that are social, psychological, and lifestyle-related.

What this new understanding tells us is that our current healthcare system over-emphasizes our treatment of the physical signals being sent to our brains and under-emphasizes our treatment of these other causes.

And on account of this new understanding, the healthcare system worldwide is undergoing a massive correction. As clinical results continue to stream in, many of the most well-respected health organizations from all around the world have already updated their guidelines to support and promote this new understanding of pain.

But despite this progress, there remains a gap between guideline and practice, meaning too many people continue to experience too much pain on account of bad information. And after understanding our own pain more accurately and experiencing relief ourselves, we wanted to help others do the same.

So we built Function.

Function brings to bear the latest research from the pain science community to help you both understand and, over the course of 10 weeks, relieve your pain through a series of daily exercises that address your pain's biological, psychological, and lifestyle-related causes.

We call this 10 week process retraining your nervous system and believe that this kind of multidisciplinary approach is necessary for long-term relief from persistent pain.

If you're one of the 100 million of us with persistent lower back pain, give Function a spin.