Why Your Pain Isn't What You Think It Is with Dr. Jordan Fersel

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down why your pain isn't what you think it is. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought Dr. Jordan Fersel and the EO Fire Studios. Dr. Jordan is a pain management physician with decades of experience focused on uncovering unlooked causes of chronic pain and advancing more effective pain-centered approaches through education, research, and clinical practice. And today we talk about noticing the pattern when scans don't match reality, rethinking the approach.

0:37John Lee Dumas:It's all in your head and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Dr. Jordan and our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me. If you're feeling stuck or like you're ready to get to the next level in your career, then finding the right coach can help. Go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 % off your first coaching session. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more.

1:19John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com. highlevelfire.com. Dr. Jordan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. How are you doing out there? So I can't say that I've been an entrepreneur on a grand scale, but I know a few things. And one of the things is at least in things like established things like medicine and maybe even law in order to be a good entrepreneur you have to buck the system you have to look at places that things people are doing things just out of habit or out of tradition and you have to search for those areas where people are just, you know, if you ask them why they do it, they'll answer you because we've done it that way all the time.

2:18And, hey, if it's working, that's wonderful. But if it's not working, then you have to start asking some questions and you have to start thinking creatively and out of the box. And I think that is what successful entrepreneurship is kind of, the way it's represented in my life. And I think it's represented for a lot of other entrepreneurs. So just thinking in ways, thinking laterally, thinking out of the box, thinking in ways that other people just didn't have the vision or they didn't have the desire to look at things differently because they don't want to buck the system. That, I think, is what creates innovation.

3:01John Lee Dumas:You know, a sad but very honest truth that we hear a lot in the industry is that humanity progresses one death at a time. Because people who are alive and they're in power, they're usually the old stojis. They don't want to change. They don't want to adapt. They don't want to try new things because that's working for them. And frankly, they know that they're at the end of their chain too. So they hang on even tighter for that reason. So it's a sad but true reality that those of us that can buck that trend earlier, Fire Nation, there's some opportunity there. And I want to talk about why your pain isn't what you think it is.

3:40John Lee Dumas:And let's start by talking about the noticing, or I should say noticing of the pattern. Because, Dr. Jordan, you've spent literally decades working with patients who are in pain. And for those of us that are listening right now that have been in pain, myself included, of course, I'm a human being. We know that when you're in pain, almost nothing else matters. It's just like, how do I relieve this pain? Like it is the most important thing in our world at that moment in time. So was there a moment that you, Dr. Jordan, for you when you started to feel like, hey, we might be missing something in how we're approaching pain?

4:15I've been doing this kind of work for over 30 years. And I must say, I've seen a lot of unhappy patients walk out of my office. And the reason that they're unhappy is because we just have not adequately diagnosed what's going on with them. And in many cases, they end up getting the blame themselves. And, you know, before the government cracked down on it, they used to a lot of these people used to get addicted to narcotics and benzodiazepines because the doctors, you know, they they really wanted to treat them. but they didn't understand why, the reason that they're having this pain, and they didn't realize why the pain wasn't getting any better, why it would just go on and on and on.

5:02And, of course, one thing you have to realize is that the main symptom that brings people to the doctor is pain. So you can imagine how many people, you know, they haven't seen a doctor for a while, they haven't had a checkup for a few years, but, you know, I have this pain in my ear. I have this pain in my elbow or my knee or my back. And, you know, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it means. I don't know if it's serious going to the doctor and trying to find out what it is. And, you know, imagine the disappointment when, you know, the doctor does an MRI. There's not much wrong with you structurally on the MRI and you're still having pain.

5:45You know, a lot of doctors will question the motives of their patients when they get a patient like that. And I would have to say the most impactful and significant moment of my career was when one of the nurses that I had worked with in the operating room, in the recovery room, she worked. and I knew her very well. And she came into my office one day. She goes, I'm not here as a patient, doc, but I just want you to know, you know, my son had shoulder surgery and he became addicted to narcotics because he still had a lot of pain after the surgery. And last week he died. He died of an overdose.

6:37Oh, yeah, it was it was really a real low point. But obviously, you know, it got me to thinking, you know, it's I mean, you know, we as medical establishment are, you know, in a way we're responsible. We want we want people to feel better and get better. But, you know, we certainly don't want an outcome like that. That was the worst possible of all outcomes. So it got me to thinking about the reasons why people may still have pain after having an injury or a surgical procedure. And I just had to put a lot of ideas together that I had learned from studying the medical literature for many years.

7:24and I came up with what I thought was a reasonable hypothesis, a reasonable reason why people would still be having pain even after surgery had fixed the problem or even if they had pain and the MRI was basically normal. And that's a lot of people. Let me tell you, that must be about 20 % to 40 % of all pain patients that we see. And, of course, that translates into millions of people throughout the United States and probably tens or hundreds of millions throughout the world.

7:59John Lee Dumas:This is a crazy statistic to hear. And I'm going to move this along, Dr. Jordan, because we have a lot to talk about, specifically when it comes to when scans don't match reality. I mean, there's a lot of people, they experience a disconnect. Their scans are saying one thing, like you said, about the MRIs, but their body's telling them a completely different story. And sometimes they're being blamed. They're like, does this person just want drugs? Do they just want the painkillers and, you know, being from Maine myself, that was one of the epicenters of the fentanyl crisis. So we've all seen and experienced that.

8:27John Lee Dumas:So I know you've seen that in your own work and I know that shaped your understanding of pain. So let's talk about rethinking the approach because once you started questioning that gap, how did your approach evolve? We're not just talking clinically, but specifically, how did you listen to and interpret what a patient is actually experiencing? In your question really lies the answer. because you have to really sit there and listen to the patient. And it's a funny kind of thing about patients. You know, they'll have some injury or they'll have some pain, and they'll say to you, well, you know, it's my shoulders that are bothering me when really it's their upper spine, and it's my knee that's bothering me when it's really an adjacent area that may have a nerve that's irritated.

9:19So we have to first listen to the patient and then we have to kind of interpret it in within the framework that we give ourselves what's going on with that. So what is this framework that I'm talking about? It's it's a fascinating thing because, you know, there are very few unsolved mysteries in medicine to this day. and pain management and kind of psychiatry go hand in hand. They can be viewed as kind of brain-related disorders. But my belief was that I was going to believe the patient. I had a tendency to think of patients this way. If your life was good on a Tuesday and you were going to work and you had a good relationship with your wife and your kids and you got into an accident on Wednesday and you were in horrible shape, you got really smashed up in the accident, broke a bone or two, having excruciating pain, you don't have any real enjoyment.

10:30And then it progresses through weeks and months. And you've had, if you needed any operations, you've had any problems with your spine that will show up on the MRIs taken care of. And after months, you're still in pain. Well, the doctors are looking at you and they're basically saying to you, you know, sorry, buddy, we've done everything that we can do. And we've done every test that we can see that something's wrong. and you know look it's not hard for an orthopedic surgeon to say to somebody uh you know i fixed what your problem is i saw what it was on the mri i don't really know why you're still having pain but the truth of the matter is that the reason that people have pain is because we have nerves all over our body and the nerves are like a system for sensing any kind of abnormality that's going on, usually in a joint, but also in our internal organs.

11:28And so I would like you to think of it this way, that you've ever seen the check engine light go off on your car. I'm sure that most people have had that experience. So when you when you see that red light go on, other than kind of person, you're looking at you're looking at it and that and you're saying, oh my god what's what's broken in the engine and that's certainly one reason that the check engine light can go on but there's another reason i found out along the way that the check engine light can go on and that is that there is a problem with one of the sensors and if the sensor doesn't function properly then the check engine light is going to go on as well and so our nerves our nervous system is like the sensors if you have pain in a joint and it doesn't go away then it's a possibility it's a strong possibility that instead of there being a problem in the joint in the in the shoulder joint itself especially if you had a normal mri that there's a problem with the nerve with the sensor that goes to the joint and honestly there's no person that can tell the difference between a problem with the nerve that goes to the joint and a pain in the joint itself because since the nerve is responsible for detecting pain and relaying the message back and forth to the brain it's going to come out exactly the same so we have basically two different causes that provide a singular outcome in the experience of pain so my mission is to get more doctors to consider that there may be other reasons that you're experiencing the pain, and it may be due to injury to a nerve.

13:20When you break your ankle, you are also stretching the nerves that go to your foot.

13:26John Lee Dumas:I want to continue to talk about your mission and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me. I've interviewed over 5 ,000 successful entrepreneurs. And one thing they all have in common, they've enlisted mentors, coaches, and people along the way to help guide them. But where do you find the right coach or mentor? Great question. And that's where our strawberry.me career coaching comes in. I speak from personal experience when I say that coaching and mentorship has helped me get to where I am today. In fact, you might not even be listening to entrepreneurs on fire if it weren't for my first coach and mentor, Jamie Masters.

14:05John Lee Dumas:I knew that in order to produce the best podcast, I needed to find someone who was where I wanted to be. Here we are nearly 14 years later, and I'd say I made a fantastic investment. So if you're feeling stuck, facing an important career decision, or ready to make your next big move, the right coach can help. Go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 % off for your first coaching session. That's strawberry.me slash fire. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform.

14:44John Lee Dumas:Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 15-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more.

15:19John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com. and start building your something today. Dr. Jordan, we're back, and I want to move on to the it's all in your head narrative because, I mean, that's a major problem that a lot of people are facing. I mean, this narrative that chronic pain is just like, it's in your head, it's purely stress-related. Why do you think that explanation has become so common, and what might we be overlooking when we just default to that? Wonderful question. There was a physiatrist, a physical medicine and rehab doctor that wrote a very famous book.

15:58His name was John Sarno, and he died a few years ago in his mid-90s. And the name of the book was Mind Over Back Pain. And he felt that we all have certain weak points in our body and that if we could kind of focus on taking the stress out of those weak points, that might be muscles in the back. It might be certain types of anxiety, excitability, that you would be able to kind of control the pain experience that you're having. And the truth is that that's not a bad approach. For many people, they do kind of get hyper excitable. They do come under stress, and it will trigger muscle spasm and a pain response in the body.

16:50I'm not so interested in those people because eventually they'll get better with the proper physical therapy and other psychological measures. So there is some pain that is coming directly from our heads. But there's also about a 5 % to 15 % group of patients that experience pain and the pain lingers. And the pain lingers not so much because it's coming from their head, but because it's coming from an injury to some of the basic structures that provide information to the brain and to the spine and the brain about pain that's going on in the body. And as I alluded to before, you know, if one of the sensors that you have is injured or broken, damaged, then it's going to send continuous messages of pain and injury.

17:49And so that's it's ending up in your brain, but it's not coming from your brain. And, you know, we used to talk a lot about secondary gains, you know, people that, you know, would would fake injury in order to, you know, get insurance claims and things like that. And while I'm sure that there is some of that going on, there's not enough benefit of the doubt that's given to patients. And you really can prove to the patient and to yourself through certain maneuvers during the physical exam that there is something going on with the nervous system that's abnormal. There are certain places where nerves get stretched and compressed in the body, and those areas are very well known anatomically.

18:34And just by pressing over those areas and eliciting the pain, that's a very significant indication that there's something very wrong going on with the sensory system in the body.

18:45John Lee Dumas:And let's be honest. I mean, one of the most painful places in most humans, I mean, almost everybody's experience at some point in their life is back pain. And that's why I just love the title of your book, which is when bad backs happen to good people. So when did you realize this wasn't just something for your practice, but something you need to share more broadly and put it into the form of a book? I noticed that the conventional treatments that we were doing, which were mostly, you know, the 80s and 90s were epidural injections. They would help for a little while and then the effects would wear off.

19:22And then about 10 years ago, we were able to pull out pieces of discs from herniated discs and that helped. But, you know, it didn't help everybody. There were still plenty of patients that were having pain in their spine. Even after that, they were having headaches. They were having pain in their extremities. And so at that point, I just this is where you question the status quo, where I said to myself, well, it's all well and good to focus on the spine. but there's a whole nervous system outside of the spine and the brain that also can get damaged and the problem is that when there's something wrong in the spine most of the time we're able to image it we're able to see what the problem is on the mri or on the cat scan but the big problem is with nerve injury with peripheral nerve injury is that there is absolutely no diagnostic test to provide objective evidence of what's going on.

20:26And so patients become suspect because if I don't see any kind of abnormality, if I don't see on a test something that's wrong, then I'm just going to say, well, it must be in your head. And nothing could be further from the truth. There are so many people that have been dismissed by the medical field and the medical care that they've received. And those people have, I mean, some commit suicide. That's how bad it is. They can't get any more of the medications that might have helped them because of this whole opioid crisis. It was definitely over-marketed, some of these medications. But that's not to say that there aren't some people that might not have benefited from it.

21:20But the average person, they can be treated just by decreasing the irritation and the inflammation in the nerve once you've found it.

21:30John Lee Dumas:I mean, Fire Nation, this is incredible that we live in a world where we can understand pain at this level. And it's only going to get better from here as we start bringing AI into the equation and other amazing things. He's going to be able to run tests and do some just really special things going forward in this area. Now, if you want to figure out a little bit more about pain for yourself, Fire Nation, When Bad Backs Happen to Good People is going to be available wherever you get your books. So go ahead and check it out. It's going to be a great read. It could save you a lifetime of pain, your friends, your family, your loved ones.

22:05John Lee Dumas:I mean, what better gift can you give a person than handing them a product, in this case, a book that could potentially lead to them living a much less pain or potentially even pain-free life. I mean, talk about a friend for life right there. So Dr. Jordan, what I want to just kind of close with you, and I'm going to challenge you because I know this is going to be challenging for you. Sum up your book in one sentence in under 30 seconds. Don't believe everything that you've been taught and everything that you've heard question authority when it doesn't make sense and always always look for the cause look for the mechanism of what's happening i studied a lot of biomechanics and a lot of physics and a lot of biology and chemistry to come up with some of these answers but you know what the main thing i used to figure some of this out was my imagination and imagination is a fantastic thing it's not a lie it's just closing the gaps and if you can close the gaps and put the picture all together you will be successful and we're we're coming to an age where we are going to have objective evidence of what i'm talking about and as you said i'm looking forward to that day because a lot more patients will have some understanding and more sympathy and empathy for what they're going through.

23:36John Lee Dumas:One minute and 14 seconds. You almost did it, Dr. Jordan. You almost did it. Not quite. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JSF and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Jordan in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Jordan, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Jordan for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation.

24:10John Lee Dumas:Are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me if you're feeling stuck or like you're ready to get to the next level in your career then finding the right coach can help go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 off your first coaching session stop duct taping your business together high level runs your website your funnels email automation scheduling payments and memberships all in one place.

24:49John Lee Dumas:And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial, plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com.