 Your thoughts beliefs and expectations your mindset impacts your health How quickly you heal and how well your medications work including powerful opioid painkillers It's important to develop new drugs and surgical techniques to address health problems like pain But what if we invested in changing patients mindsets so that these treatments worked better And so that some people wouldn't need them at all My science focuses on mindset intervention for pain relief to address one of the most pressing health care problems in the world 30 to 40 percent of people worldwide are living with ongoing pain Chronic pain is more prevalent and costly than diabetes heart disease and cancer combined Chronic pain is the number one reason people are out of work and it contributes to lost productivity Estimates suggest that it costs the US economy 635 billion dollars each year pain persists because the treatments are inadequate no matter where you feel pain in your body It's processed in the central nervous system the brain and the spinal cord pain is highly responsive to each person's psychology And mindset and this presents an opportunity a negative pain mindset a pattern of expecting worse pain Ruminating on it and feeling helpless about it We call this pain catastrophizing and it predicts your pain intensity your need for opioid medication Length of hospital stay after surgery how well your treatments work and whether you become disabled from it you were born motivated to escape pain But you are not born knowing how to modulate pain or the distress that it causes you This must be learned. I have developed brief low-cost and scalable Interventions that teach patients how to calm their nervous system and cultivate patterns of thought That correlate with pain relief patients learn to entrain new neural networks and therefore they reduce their own pain and their own suffering patients learn to train their brains away from pain with lasting results our Recent research has shown that a targeted to our pain relief mindset class Equips patients with the tools to alter the trajectory of their pain. They simply gain control over their pain experience Now we're applying the power of this mindset science to prevent pain after surgery Each year millions of people develop chronic pain after surgery in part due to mindset factors a negative pain mindset is more Predictive of post-surgical outcomes than the disease the surgery or the surgeon at Stanford We are characterizing patients before surgery to determine who is at risk Then we introduce them to a fully automated online pain relief mindset intervention Designed to help them optimize their post-surgical outcomes Research from our group and others has shown that a negative pain mindset and trains neural networks and brain Connectivity in such a way that the nervous system is primed for future pain But effective psychological treatment for pain changes the way the brain functions and it changes the structure of the brain So that you're primed for relief this image displaying that pain processing Diminishes as pain relief mindset skills are actively used Now we're applying this science to address risks associated with long-term prescription opioid use Many patients would like to reduce their opioid use, but they believe in fear that their pain will worsen if they do our Interventions enhance patients positive expectations and therefore their willingness to partner with their doctors to taper their opioids The US government just awarded me and my team nine million dollars to study our techniques and over a thousand patients taking opioids Rather than forcing them down a care pathway that amplifies their fears We're partnering with them on the path to less pain and fewer pills This is the power of mindset science Patient empowerment to cost effective low-risk pain relief. Thank you