EMDR for Chronic Back Pain: Could Processing Trauma Ease the Pain?

Chronic back pain is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. For many people, no clear physical cause can be found, and the pain persists despite painkillers, physiotherapy, and other standard treatments. This kind of pain, often called non-specific chronic back pain, can be frustrating and demoralising precisely because it resists explanation. In recent years, researchers have paid closer attention to the emotional side of persistent pain. Brain imaging studies suggest that as pain becomes chronic, the way the brain processes it shifts away from purely physical pathways and toward emotional ones. At the same time, stressful and traumatic life experiences appear to be linked with the development and maintenance of long-term pain. Together, these findings raise an intriguing question: if unresolved emotional distress helps keep pain alive, could a therapy that processes that distress help to ease it? That therapy is eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, or EMDR. Developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, EMDR helps the brain reprocess distressing memories so they lose their emotional charge, and with it, some of their hold over thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. A randomised controlled pilot study by Andreas Gerhardt and colleagues, published in *Frontiers in Psychiatry* (2016), explored this directly. The researchers recruited forty patients with non-specific chronic back pain who had also experienced psychological trauma. Participants were randomly assigned either to continue with their usual treatment or to receive ten sessions of a specially designed, pain-focused EMDR programme in addition to that usual care. The findings were encouraging. Compared with usual care alone, the group that received EMDR showed meaningful improvements in pain intensity. As a pilot study, its main purpose was to test whether the approach was workable and worth investigating on a larger scale, and the results suggested it was. A few cautions are important. This was a small, preliminary study, the therapists delivering the treatment were aware of which patients received EMDR, and longer follow-up would help confirm whether the benefits last. The authors are clear that bigger trials are needed before firm conclusions can be drawn. Even so, for a condition as stubborn and widespread as chronic back pain, these early results make a strong case for considering EMDR, particularly where trauma sits in the background. *Source: Gerhardt, A., Leisner, S., Hartmann, M., Janke, S., Seidler, G. H., Eich, W., & Tesarz, J. (2016). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing vs. Treatment-as-Usual for Non-Specific Chronic Back Pain Patients with Psychological Trauma: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 7, 201.*