If you wind up in the unfortunate situation of breaking an arm, you’ll be relieved when the doctor tells you exactly what’s needed to heal.

Modern medicine has incredible resources, infrastructure, and technology for treating structural problems. Physicians and scientists have spent the past century figuring out how to help when something is broken, blocked, torn, or bleeding.

However, when issues don’t show up on scans the medical system is not so mighty.

Over 45% of primary care consultations in the United States are for medically unexplained symptoms, issues that lack a clearly identifiable cause.

200M Americans are suffering from chronic pain, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, dizziness, gastrointestinal issues, heaviness or pressure, malaise, numbness, burning, light and sound sensitivity, shortness of breath, hypersomnia, accelerated heart rate and more.Chronic pain alone affects more Americans than heart disease, cancer, and diabetes combined.^[1]

So naturally, the brightest minds of our generation are spending billions of dollars scouring the body for an explanation for these conditions. Their search is based on the assumption that if you're in pain or experiencing any symptom, there must be structural damage in the body.

As patients, we’re prescribed medication like it’s a sport. We’re given surgery while being told it might not help the pain. Or we’re told that we just have to live more limited lives and find ways to “manage” the symptoms.

But there’s new science that is changing medicine.

We now know from fMRI technology that symptoms in the body are protective warning signals created by the brain.^[2] If you were to break your hand right now, the pain is made and felt entirely in the brain. It’s telling you to stop using your hand so you can heal.

That’s why people can have symptoms with no damage (phantom limb pain: symptoms in a body part that no longer exists) or damage with no symptoms (soldiers only realizing they’re wounded once they’re safely off the battlefield).

We all know that the brain can send protective warning signals in the absence of structural damage. Imagine a young child, petrified before a speech in front of the whole class. Stomach pain. Heart racing. Shivering. Even throwing up.

Would you tell them they have ulcerative colitis? Or Crohn's disease? That they’re having a heart attack?

Of course not. It’s their unconscious brain feeling unsafe. 90% of the processing our brain does is completely unconscious. Right now our heart is beating, we’re breathing, and hundreds of other unconscious mechanisms are getting us through the day.

The brain can create signals in the absence of damage, and these signals can get stuck on loop.

We call these: neuroplastic symptoms.

Neuroplastic Training (NPT) is a structured, skills-based training approach to correct the chronic misfiring of these protective signals. Rather than receiving passive care like medicines or procedures, individuals learn and apply the tools themselves. NPT is delivered in hour-long virtual sessions with a Certified Neuroplastic Trainer (CNPT).