On a misty autumn morning in Australia’s Royal National Park, just south of Sydney, a peloton of nearly two dozen cyclists tackles a 3,740-foot ascent. When they reach the highest point of the day’s 45-mile ride — the first leg of a weeklong journey — they’re rewarded with cookies and candy from support staff, followed by a downhill glide along a sandstone escarpment. Far below them, waves of the Pacific barrel toward shore and explode in clouds of foam.
The group is not training for an athletic event. Instead, the 21 cyclists and their support crew have united to promote an unconventional pain management approach. The team wants to start a revolution. The road ahead is a long one.
Australian physical therapist and pain scientist Lorimer Moseley, 48, got the idea for the annual ride because he wanted to connect with other practitioners, and patients, to change how they thought about and treated chronic pain, particularly in rural areas where access to care is limited. The first Pain Revolution outreach tour hit the road in 2017. Covering more than 500 miles of southern Australian roads, the cyclists spent their nights in small towns and hamlets, offering talks on pain science and its practical application. The response was so enthusiastic that Moseley and his University of South Australia colleagues developed a formal training program for local pain educators. The inaugural class convened in 2018.
Chronic pain is a common and expensive problem. In the U.S., 1 in 3 Americans deals with the condition. The price tag of treatment — including medication, surgery and other often invasive options, as well as lost productivity and additional costs — runs more than $600 billion annually. Moseley and his colleagues believe, however, that much of what we spend on chronic pain — not just money, but also time, energy and quality of life — could be saved.
The solution that they advocate, which has its share of critics, is essentially to retrain the body’s pain system, particularly the brain, to be less sensitive. According to the Pain Revolutionaries, that process begins by understanding that pain is the brain’s response to perceived threat.
