Built for pain that doesn't match the scan.
Relief is a 42-session brain-based pain retraining program. It works by teaching your nervous system to stop producing false pain signals. The underlying mechanism is the same across conditions: a brain that learned to produce pain as a protective response, even after the tissue has healed.
If a healthcare provider has cleared you structurally and the pain persists, find your condition below. Read the FAQ or the science for more on how this works.
MRI came back normal but you're still in pain. Pain that moves, fluctuates, or tracks your stress more than your activity. The landmark 2022 JAMA trial showed two-thirds of chronic back pain participants became pain-free through brain-based retraining.
Nothing on the scan but everything hurts. Whole-body pain, brain fog, fatigue. Blood tests normal, rheumatologist has no answers. Now understood as central sensitisation: the brain amplifying all incoming signals.
Disc bulge on the MRI, shooting pain down the leg. But imaging studies show disc herniations in 30% of pain-free 20-year-olds. When symptoms don't match the structural finding, the nervous system is amplifying the signal.
Daily or near-daily headaches your neurologist can't explain. Growing list of triggers and avoidances. The trigger list keeps expanding because the brain's threat-detection system is interpreting ordinary signals as dangerous.
Fixed the desk, fixed the chair, fixed the pillow. Pain stayed. Research shows posture correlates poorly with neck pain. Cervical degeneration appears on MRIs of people with zero symptoms. The nervous system is the missing piece.
Mouth guards, night guards, Botox, bite adjustments. Nothing lasting. TMJ is strongly associated with stress and central sensitisation. The jaw clenches in response to threat. Dental interventions treat the symptom, not the signal.
Years of cycling through specialists. Invasive tests. Maybe a label: IC, vulvodynia, prostatitis. But no clear answer. Chronic pelvic pain syndromes are increasingly understood as central sensitisation conditions with a shared nervous system mechanism.
"Bone on bone" sounds permanent. But people with worse imaging findings walk around pain-free. Knee arthritis findings correlate poorly with pain levels. When the nervous system is sensitised, it amplifies the signal beyond what the joint condition warrants.
Important: Relief is not a replacement for medical care. If you have not been examined by a qualified healthcare provider, do that first. These pages are for pain where the tissue story does not explain the pain. Read the full disclaimer.
Different conditions. Same nervous system.
The conditions above look different on the surface. But the research shows they share a common mechanism: a brain that has learned to produce pain as a protective response, even after the tissue has healed or when no tissue damage exists.
This is called central sensitisation. It has been demonstrated across chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, tension headaches, TMJ, pelvic pain syndromes, and knee osteoarthritis. The treatment principles are shared too: pain education, sensation tracking, graded exposure, and safety behaviour withdrawal.
Relief delivers those principles as a single 42-session program. The condition is yours. The mechanism is universal. Read more about the science.