Therapy can bring relief to chronic back pain

As many as one in five Americans suffer from chronic pain, an often intractable problem that costs the country more than $600 billion in treatments and lost work-time and has helped fuel a deadly opioid epidemic.

But new CU Boulder research, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that a non-drug, psychological treatment can provide potent and durable relief.

This study suggests a fundamentally new way to think about both the causes of chronic back pain for many people and the tools that are available to treat that pain.