Your Pain is a Superpower: Learn to Use it Wisely

By Kevin Reichlin

"Reading this book is like sitting down with Dr. Reichlin in his office, on the edges of your own healing journey." -George Kembel, Co-Founder, Stanford University d.school

IT TAKES MORE THAN standard measures to understand pain-and put it in its place. In Your Pain is a Superpower, Dr. Kevin Reichlin offers creative pathways a

• Language: English
• Publisher: BoCo Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987256817

Book preview

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For anyone in pain who is searching for something different . . .

For my patients, my teachers, my family and friends

To Amy and Debra

How did I ever get so lucky?

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Copyright ©2023 Kevin Reichlin, DC

Foreword ©2023 George Kembel

All rights reserved, including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

For Reprints, Media visit KevinReichlin.com

For information on special sales and bulk purchases of this book, including special discounts, please contact BoCo Media Special Sales at [e-mail]

Interior Text set in Adobe Caslon Pro

Designed in the United States of America

Printed in Denver, Colorado, USA

Cover Design: Mimi Bark

Interior Design: Laura Scott

Editing: Curt Pesmen

Copy Editing: Dianne Hammer

Art/Design: Brian Berley, Laura Scott, Leigh Alila Stracener, Windy Waite

Library of Congress Control Number in process

Your Pain is a Superpower: Learn to Use it Wisely

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

ISBN = 0-979-8-9872568-0-0

BoCo Media, LLC

Boulder, Colorado 80304 USA

Reader’s Note

A Health and Medical Disclaimer

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and useful information on the subjects addressed, and is provided for educational purposes only. It is not meant to replace professional medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Any attempt to diagnose and treat a medical condition should be done under the direction of a healthcare provider or physician.

This book is distributed and sold with the understanding that neither the author nor publisher is engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services herein. For any medical condition, each individual is recommended to consult with a healthcare provider before using any information, idea, or products discussed. The reader should consult his or her medical, health or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and/or attempted application of any of the contents of this book.

Certain names and identifying characteristics herein have been changed for reasons of personal or medical privacy.

About the Author

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KEVIN REICHLIN was born and raised in Upstate New York, outside of Buffalo. He started his pre-med at Buffalo State College for two years before transferring to the University of New Hampshire. After graduating from Iowa’s Palmer College of Chiropractic (the same school his father, Frank, attended 30 years earlier), he returned to New Hampshire for the first 20 years of his career.

While in New Hampshire, he lived on an organic farm that employed draft horses, and later lived in the city of Portsmouth. He currently lives and practices in Boulder, Colo., along with his wife, Amy, and stepsons Julian and Blake. This is his first book.

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Your Superpower Guide, In the Doctor’s Own Words

PART ONE

Chapter 1: You’re Not a Machine!

Chapter 2: BioPsychology, Pain, and Anxiety

Chapter 3: The Great Myth of Singular Causality in Pain

Chapter 4: Dr. Google and You, A New Superpower

INTERMISSION I

Clinician vs. Researcher: When A + B ≠ C

PART TWO

Chapter 5: Choice + Pain, Athletes + Patients

Chapter 6: Archetypes and Imagery

Chapter 7: Biomechanics and Your Body

Chapter 8: Effort in Health and Healing

INTERMISSION II

3 Ways We Learn (and Unlearn) Pain

PART THREE

Chapter 9: Mindset and Feelset .

Chapter 10: Feelset vs. Mindset in the Healing Process

Chapter 11: Neuro-Adaptive Laser Technique: Cold Lasers and New Healing Pathways

Chapter 12: Body Insight, Patient Vision

Chapter 13: 5 Senses Reprogramming: A Sensual Technique

Chapter 14: IQ + EQ = WQ (Wisdom Quotient)

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1: Milestones of Chiropractic: A Timeline

Appendix 2: Shared Readings

Foreword

It’s not always where we think it is.

Long before I first visited his office, I had gotten to know Dr. Kevin Reichlin personally. At the time, I had been experiencing severe pain in my lower back that would surface every six months or so, like a knife wedged between my vertebrae that made it difficult for me to get in and out of cars, in and out of bed, walk and sit. This had been happening for decades, I presumed as a result of two incidents—a rolling car accident I was a passenger in, compounded by a go-cart accident years later. Everything else I had tried and all the other doctors I had seen simply hadn’t helped. I was about to embark on a long flight to China for work, my lower back was in extreme pain, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive the trip. So I called Kevin.

He started our session by asking many questions, listening intently to what I was experiencing and how I thought about the origins of my pain. He watched how I sat uncomfortably on the table and how difficult it was for me to move. The first few things Kevin did were familiar to me. He had me lie down and adjusted my lower spine to release the tension that had accumulated in my distress.

He then examined my lower legs and ankles and asked me to raise one leg at a time and resist him pushing it down. On my right leg, it was easy for me to resist his downward force. On my left leg it was not so easy. He pushed my leg down without much effort. I clearly didn’t have the same strength on that side of my body. Kevin explained to me that he suspected my lower back pain had less to do with the automobile accident and more to do with some injury to my left ankle when I was a boy. That was curious, I thought. No one else had been able to identify the likely source of my back pain.

It’s not always where we think it is, Kevin said.

At this point something happened I had never experienced before. Kevin pulled out a little device the shape of a pack of index cards and held it close to my lower back. He said he was shining a laser at important parts of my nerve pathways along my spine. Then he asked me to repeat the leg lifting exercise. As expected, my right leg was unchanged. It was strong and I could resist his downward push. When he asked me to lift my weaker leg again, it was now strong enough to resist his force, only moments after the first test. I laughed in utter disbelief and wonderment.

How could the strength in my left leg change that quickly? What happened, I asked?

When we injure ourselves, Kevin said, our body disconnects some of the synapses that connect our brain to the part of the body that is injured. It turns out this is a brilliant protective mechanism our bodies use to reduce our capacity to move and cause greater injury. These synapses, I learned, don’t always reconnect fully as our injuries heal. It’s not that I was lacking strength in my left leg, but that I lacked the ability to recruit the muscle strength already present because I didn’t have enough wires connected to the muscles I wanted to move. His laser stimulated my nerves’ abilities to reconnect and stay that way. It felt like nothing short of magic.

I was able to fly to China and back, and my pain subsided. In the following visits, Kevin continued to check on my back and legs and started to introduce me to additional healing strategies and ways to dive deep into my relationship to pain. I remained curious about the journey on which Kevin was taking me. The strategies and concepts Kevin has discovered, developed and honed over almost four decades of experience, have since fundamentally shifted my relationship with my body, my pain and my role in my own healing. Kevin has taught me to honor the alarms my body sends me, identify the unquestioned constellation of feelings I have accumulated around my pain, recognize my learned associations of pain attached to certain movements (like getting in and out of the car), and tap new ways to speak to my subconscious to reprogram my deeper conditionings around my back, my strength, and my pain.

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Months later, when my back pain returned, like it always did, I had new strategies to receive it, experience it, work with it, and heal. Instead of taking months for my pain to subside as it did in the past, I was able to tend to it in weeks. With continued practice using Kevin’s techniques and additional work around the way energy flows in my body, I have been able to reduce the healing time from months, to weeks, to now days. This work has cultivated a wider awareness within my body—and a presence in how I move day to day to the point where I have not experienced the same back pain in years. It has been unbelievably freeing.

Not all doctors actually work with you to heal, Kevin once mentioned to me. Many are in the business of ‘acute care,’ and more often symptom reduction. He has taught me to revere the capabilities of our medical system. He has also taught me to understand its limits.

Reading Kevin’s book is like sitting down with him in his doctor’s office. You get a feeling what it’s like to work with him on the edges of your own healing journey. You become exposed to the wisdom, tools, and techniques he has developed as he has worked with elite athletes, parents, kids, professionals, and countless others. I sense he is pointing us toward a part of our collective future of medicine.

My hope is you will get a glimpse of the magic here, too.

—George Kembel, Boulder, Colo., October 2022

Introduction:

Your Superpower Guide,

In the Doctor’s Own Words

WHAT IS YOUR SUPERPOWER? is a question I’ve heard people ask in various settings. It’s a question I personally love, because it’s asking people to be honest about themselves regarding what they believe has helped them become successful. I’ve heard answers from I am completely honest to I can persevere no matter what to I have a killer sense of humor.

I, nowadays, will often answer, "I know how to deal with pain really well. Which raises eyebrows, as you may imagine, and is usually followed by, What do you mean by that?"

So I explain:

Most of us know people who have been through a very painful episode in their lives. And I’ve observed that while their pain was very difficult, all these people learned and grew from their painful experiences. And yet our entire healthcare system overwhelmingly is designed to stop pain. Which essentially stops the chance to learn and grow.

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While I am in no way advocating for painful experiences to strike people, the premise of this book is about how to learn and grow from our inevitable pain. Every one of us has this superpower. Most of us just don’t know how to use it.

Over the past five-plus decades, I’ve been fortunate to have had the chance to learn this superpower, both on my own and with the help of many extraordinary others. I truly hope this book helps you to gain access to yours as well.

Why People Matter to Me

Like all doctors, upon graduating from school, I knew a lot of healthcare technique. Also a lot about anatomy, physiology, and pathology.

Unlike many doctors, though, I knew even in school that there was more to human beings—those who would someday come to my office for care—than just their physical bodies. I knew that the various ailments for which patients would someday come to me would have greater underlying causes than merely the pathological symptomatic factors that showed up on X-rays, blood tests, and/or orthopedic-neurological tests. I knew that people were more than just their tests and examination results. But because I was really interested in those areas of human physiology, I studied all those physical factors, a lot! And learned them well.

At the beginning of my career in the early 1980s, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But my natural curiosity kept me always looking around and learning. And one thing I discovered was I needed to learn more about people. What it was that made people tick, what was underneath the various symptoms, what was beyond the exam results.

People came to me for care, and that very word—care—also caught my attention early on. I wanted to care about my patients. Not just care about their symptoms, or just their test results, but care about them as people. As I came to understand, people have symptoms—i.e., illnesses, and issues. But symptoms, illnesses and issues don’t have people! People are a factor, an equally important if not more important factor, than their symptoms.

So I embarked on a journey of learning more and more about people. Yes, I continued to add to my knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pathology and health techniques. But I also avidly continued to learn as much as I could, and continue to do so, about the incredibly complex, beautifully complicated creatures we call people.

One thing I quickly realized was that I didn’t have a lot in the way of people skills. Healthcare schools (medical, chiropractic, dental, etc.) don’t teach those skills, and I don’t think any young doctor really can have those skills early in his/her career. People skills develop over time. They develop as a doctor takes the time to learn about patients as people. And they develop from events and circumstances that occur in that doctor’s life, both professionally and personally.

For me, several benchmark events helped to shape me into the doctor, and the human being, I am today. They helped hone my sense of care, compassion, empathy and understanding of the people who present themselves to me, as patients, for care.

On my personal journey, I met my first wife, Debra, when we were both 19 years old. We finished growing into adulthood together through the years as we both completed undergraduate and graduate programs. I received my doctor of chiropractic degree in 1984; she received her master’s in dietetics, also in 1984. We moved to New Hampshire and established our home there. I saw patients in Dover, and she had various positions in local hospitals and clinics, as well as saw my patients who also had dietary needs.

In 1999 Debra was diagnosed with uterine cancer, specifically leiomyosarcoma. She lived for approximately three years after her diagnosis and passed away in July, 2002. During those three years we cried, laughed, worried, learned, grew, and loved—all the experiences any couple would go through.

Her passing was, of course, extremely difficult for me. We hadn’t had children, and I was left quite alone. Even with the love and care of my close friends, I suddenly had to navigate my new life on my own.

Going through this experience gave me, as a doctor, a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for people in physical, psychological, and emotional pain. To this day I easily can reach down into my psyche, my heart, and my body and find the pain that I lived through in the ensuing years as I healed myself. Yes, that pain is so much smaller than what it was in those early years. But it never truly goes away."

Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I learned from that experience was that Debra never would leave my heart. And if I wanted to live a full life, moving forward, I would just have to get bigger, make my emotional capacity expand so I could experience love and tears and laughter—all those emotions of relationship and connection—again.

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A Life Turn I’ll Always Cherish

I left New Hampshire about a year after her passing. I decided it was time to strike out in a completely new way. So I moved to Boulder, Colorado. At that time I knew two people there, some wonderful friends who let me live in their home until I could find a place of my own. (Thank you with all my heart, Ron and Susan.)

I took an entire year off from healthcare. Because I intended to remake myself, I thought a new career would be the right thing to do! So I set out doing some consulting in the business world, in the area of leadership training, as well as learning more about psychology to help me in this new endeavor.

But one day, after about a year in Boulder, I was sitting on my couch with a cup of coffee, looking out the window at the beautiful blue sky over the mountains, and thinking about my life and where I was going. . . . Suddenly I was hit by the proverbial ton of bricks—I really, really missed seeing patients!

And I’ve never looked back. I was able to get my license to practice chiropractic in Colorado within two weeks. I worked for a short time in another doctor’s office before again opening my own office. And I’ve been practicing in Boulder ever since.

I immediately began to put to use not only the skills I had developed in New Hampshire and the new information I’d learned about psychology, but my hard-won increased compassion and empathy for people who were in pain, physically and emotionally.

And I believe this is what makes me different from other docs. Not that I’m recommending other docs go through what I went through. Every doctor has a skill set that is built upon their own lives. But I have a very specific past that has given me the ability to see things from a unique perspective, one that allows me to combine psychology, physiology, pathology, and care in a different way.

Another key event that presented itself to me in Colorado was entering the world of professional cycling as a healthcare provider. I had earned a sports medicine degree back in New Hampshire, and I had started riding and racing a road bicycle at that time as well.

While in New Hampshire, I had the opportunity to meet one of the doctors ( Jeff Spencer) who was working with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team in the late 1990s, during their early Tour de France years.

Dr. Spencer and I got to know each other and stayed in touch. When I opened my practice in Boulder, I invited him to come speak about his experiences as a cycling-team doctor. Boulder is a bike-crazy town (which I love!), so his talk was well attended. He introduced me as a fellow sports-and-cycling doctor, which helped me develop a name for myself.

I got to know some of the pro riders in town. These amazing people are among the few in the world who, literally, ride and race bicycles in order to feed themselves each day! The amount of dedication required is immense—training and racing in heat, rain, cold, and wind every day for between four and seven hours a day. I was, and continue to be, impressed with these pros. Their physical bodies are truly amazing examples of what can be done when a human has the opportunity to explore every avenue of genetic, familial, personal, physical, mental and emotional capacity.

When Jonathan Vaughters, a retired pro rider in town, decided to start a team, I received an introduction; and before long he invited me to start working with his team (which became Team Garmin).

Vaughters’ cycling team was going to be a clean team, with no tolerance for any doping substances, and he wanted any and every means of helping his riders perform at their highest levels. To help them do so cleanly, he hired me to help the riders with their bodies.

And so I started an 11-year career with his team. This culminated with Team Garmin gaining its first invitation to the Tour de France in 2008. I worked at that race, as well as at pretty much every other professional bike race around the world during that 11-year span.

I retired from that position at the end of 2016. I am eternally grateful to Jonathan for giving me the opportunity to use my skills in that arena. I learned so, so much about the world of professional sports. And I was able to bring much of