87: Healing Chronic Pain with A Sense of Purpose

Early last year I had a conversation with Dr. Palmer Mackie about his 5-week Integrative Pain School program that he had developed and improved over the course of 19 years. As you will hear, he is board certified in lifestyle medicine and incorporates those modalities to help his patients move away from opioids towards a program that offers lasting and drug free results. Dr. Mackie added another component to his program called Ikigai. This is the Japanese world for having a sense of purpose. Dan Buettner’s work on The Blue Zones also found that having a sense of purpose was a common characteristic found in the longest lived people of these regions.

I reached out to Dr. Mackie recently to see how he was doing. He is now working at Oak Street Health where he will be launching a Pain Program for their 4 health centers. As you listen to his conversation, I would like you to see if finding a sense of purpose and incorporating more movement into your life will help make 2021 more manageable. It seems like we will have more of the same virtual experience this year. When we speak of pain we are not just referring to physical pain. We take into consideration depression and mental health.

I would love to hear your thoughts. You can visit out podcast website: plantbaseddfwpodcast.com and look for the blue mic icon on the lower right hand side and leave me a voicemail with your thoughts about this episode or tell us what 2020 was like for you.