Pain Is in Your Brain—And That's Hopeful News

One in five Canadians carries the invisible weight of chronic pain, a condition long misunderstood as a body's failure rather than a brain's learned alarm. Researcher Cynthia Thomson, herself a decade-long sufferer turned mountain biker, is now leading a national effort to reframe pain not as a sentence but as a signal the nervous system can be taught to reinterpret. Drawing on the biopsychosocial model — which holds that biology, psychology, and social circumstance all shape how pain is experienced — Thomson and her colleagues are working to move Canadian medicine away from medication-first a