Chronic pain affects roughly 1 in 4 adults, yet most people who live with it spend years being doubted, dismissed, and handed treatments that do not work. In this conversation, Jolly Nanda, founder of Althea and a patient living with mixed connective tissue disease, shares her search for answers, family physician Dr. Chris Thiessen explains the science of how pain becomes chronic, and Dr. Eric Anderson, Chief Medical Officer at Lin Health, describes a virtual model built around retraining the nervous system. Together they show what becomes possible when care finally treats the whole person and when patients are believed.

• Why chronic pain is a symptom of underlying conditions rather than a single diagnosis, and why finding the root cause can take years.
• How autoimmune diseases like mixed connective tissue disease manifest differently from person to person, making them difficult to diagnose with any one clear test.
• Why symptoms in new mothers and women in their 40s are often dismissed and blamed on motherhood or perimenopause.
• How keeping a longitudinal record of your own symptoms, photos, and test results can help physicians reach an accurate diagnosis, especially since flares rarely happen during appointments.
• What happens in the body and brain when pain becomes chronic, including how pain thresholds get lowered so that even a hug can hurt.
• How fibromyalgia was reframed from a suspected muscle problem into a nerve and central nervous system condition after certain nerve medications proved helpful.
• Why gabapentinoids like gabapentin and SNRIs like duloxetine became recognized treatments for chronic pain, sometimes through serendipitous discovery.
• Why opioids tend to cover up chronic pain rather than treat it, and how opioid hyperalgesia can actually increase pain over time.
• How functional MRI studies show chronic pain shifting from the somatosensory cortex to the limbic system, the area tied to emotion and memory.
• Why hearing pain is in your head does not mean it is imaginary, and how central sensitization turns up the body's pain alarm like a smoke detector that goes off at burnt toast.
• How behavioral health approaches such as pain reprocessing therapy, CBT, and ACT are considered first-line treatment for chronic pain by the CDC, ACP, and American Academy of Neurology.
• What outcomes a virtual pain recovery model can achieve, including the Boulder Back Pain Study finding that 66% of people with a decade of chronic back pain reached essentially no pain.

• Jolly Nanda, founder of Althea, a digital health startup focused on whole-person care, with a background in healthcare technology and operations, who built the platform after navigating her own chronic pain and mixed connective tissue disease diagnosis.
• Dr. Chris Thiessen, family physician practicing in Moose Lake, Minnesota, a graduate of Harvard undergraduate in mathematics and Harvard Medical School who completed his residency at Duluth Family Medicine and chose rural generalist care to make a broader difference.
• Dr. Eric Anderson, Chief Medical Officer at Lin Health, a neurologist with a PhD in neurophysiology and fellowship training in epilepsy who has spent 15 years leading remote specialist care and telemedicine to bring hard-to-find services to underserved areas.

• Rashmi Kandwal
• Colleen Rogers

Chronic Pain Care

Lin Health: lin.health

Email: hello@healthcare.mn

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