Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a treatment modality that has demonstrated clear and sustained effects in the treatment of chronic pain (Ashar et al, 2021; Ashar et al 2025). Traditionally, therapy has been aimed at helping patients live with pain, but in PRT the goal is to get rid of the pain through therapeutic work. 

PRT is based on recent research into long-term pain, which has discovered that the brain can send pain signals even when the body is not injured. When an injury occurs, the body usually heals itself over time, but for some people, the pain persists. In many cases, this is a consequence of the brain having a «pain memory» that causes the brain to continue sending pain signals. In such cases, we can train the brain to interrupt the pain memory, which causes the brain to stop sending pain signals.

The psychologist helps the client to distinguish between pain caused by physical damage (structural pain) and pain caused by psychological causes (neuroplastic pain). In the work with chronic pain, this will be a natural step now that traditional pain treatment (medication, surgery, exercise, etc.) has not had an effect. Researchers are now leaning more towards the idea that chronic pain in such cases may have a psychological cause, and should be treated psychologically. .

That the pain is psychologically conditioned or neuroplastic does not mean that the pain is imagined, but that it is no longer a physical injury that is the main cause of the pain. By working with the psychological factors that maintain and partly create pain, the client will learn powerful techniques and tools that they can use during and between classes, and be able to overcome the pain.