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Dr. Wayne Phimister: Well, welcome everybody to this special episode of the show. My guest today is Sam Visnic. Sam, welcome.

Sam Visnic: Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be here and looking forward to this chat.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Okay. Sam is a massage therapist who does things and thinks things slightly different from what he was trained to do a few years ago. It’s great to have you on and to dive into these deeper issues of how do we find solutions? How do you find solutions, Sam, for your patients and clients with chronic pain? I’ll just put the floor over to you and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to this point in your career.

Sam Visnic: Yeah, I think that what you said there as the intro, there is a little bit of an understatement. I’d say massively, actually, I think differently from my field. I started off in this field. I was a personal trainer. This is pretty much all I’ve ever done. Once I got out of high school, I was about 18, 19, I took my turn at being a personal trainer and I really loved lifting weights and the science of weight training and so forth. I was really working on myself. I was interested in body building and I got involved in a gym.

What you quickly learn when you work in a gym atmosphere is that everybody is messed up to some degree. Everybody’s walking in the door with a knee problem or a back problem or whatever, right? At the time, this is when the fitness field started booming, and this corrective exercise realm where people were playing with Swiss balls on the exercise floor and all this kind of stuff. This company, National Academy Sports Medicine, starts talking about posture and muscle imbalances and all this kind of stuff.

It was really a big boom in the field and nobody really knew much about this. Here I was at the gym, a hungry young trainer, and I was trying to get every client that I could get. A lot of the other trainers did not like working with people who had back issues, had knee issues. I’m like, “Hey, I’ll take them.” It was perfect opportunity to start working with people. What I generally found was, is that over working with, I think, hundreds of clients in this … I got lucky that there was so much volume that I could work with, is that a lot of these people, when you just modified exercises and you started getting them moving again, guess what?

They started telling me their aches and pains were gone and they had said, “I’d been to physical therapy. I did yadi yada, and it wasn’t working until I started working with you.” Didn’t take long before I started catching on to something that I was doing that was working really well. That field, I went down that rabbit hole and learned everything I could. I studied with a few mentors who were big in the movement field, and they said, “Hey you’re not going to get good at this work unless you start putting your hands on people and you start learning to work with tissues and so forth,” and that got me to massage school.

Of course, the majority of the stuff I learned in massage school, to be honest with you, is virtually useless to me because I was working more on the clinical side of things and I was working with massage therapists and coaches who were showing me things. One particular discipline was neuromuscular therapy, which is basically a lack of a better way of putting it is a very thorough massage system. It’s like here’s how you treat every single muscle in the body, and we were taught to look for trigger points and all this sorts of stuff, and that’s what I did.

I did a combination of movement work and neuromuscular therapy, and I got a knack and a name for being the guy that when you didn’t get better with therapies and you didn’t know who to see next, people would just say, “Hey, go see this guy, Sam.” Right? I kept working with more of these population that had failed from other therapies. I got used to having to be forced to be creative to try to figure out why these people didn’t get better when they had done chiropractic, injections, they had done all sorts of things and they didn’t really well or it didn’t work at all.

I had read more, and for 20 years I’ve been on this hunt for learning much more and everything I could about chronic pain, and especially in the last 10 years, you know it’s been very, very interesting now. A lot more information and accessibility to information on the internet, and that’s brought me to where I am today and sitting here in front of you.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Awesome. Well, I love your story because that’s exactly my story as well. People fail the therapies, they get me, including surgeries, they get me and then I do my little thing, and then I work with neuroplasticity, I work with inflammation and I’ve got all these different approaches to get to the root causes. The root causes. Okay, let’s go back a little bit, because I’m fussing personally about what are you doing then that makes that difference with those clients that are not getting to seem better from their chiro and their massage?

Sam Visnic: I would say that there’s many very versions or iterations of this in my career because I’ve done so many different things. I’ve swung really far into manual therapy. I’ve swung really far to exercise. I’ve become a little bit of a Jack of all trades within that small world, and every time I’d go overboard with something and I would learn something real deep, I would get a certain level of clientele better because they were usually who I was working with, and then I’d get a new crop of clientele, didn’t do anything for, and then I went and learned something else.

You and I in that realm have been the same. It’s like I had to learn nutrition, lab testing. I did internships with a medical doctor who taught me how to read labs. I did stuff like that. But every client, it was a different story. We all now know that the pain experience is very unique, and there’s many different factors within that individual’s biopsychosocial realm that is contributing to their pain experience. When I work with people now, I have a specific process that I go through with them to try to basically put people into little bit more of, I’d say, a container or a path that I could figure out which of these things are probably going to work best with them.

But also over the years, I’ve learned to network with better and better colleagues and professionals who are far better at things than I am now. Now I stay on my own track with more movement and teaching pain neuroscience and so forth, and I outsource that work. It really depends upon the individual. If you’re asking where I am now, is that what you mean?

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Yeah.

Sam Visnic: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Things have changed a lot now. What I’m always looking for is I know that the message that I’m always putting out there for people, I work with a very specific type of client, and almost always it’s the ones who have at least gone through the general standard care procedures. They’ve been to their doctor. They maybe have or have not been diagnosed with something, disc bulge or whatever, but they’re generally, let’s say, either they have had surgery and they’re out of the system or they’re nonsurgical case, they’re booted to physical therapy.

They’re usually done their rounds with a couple of therapists, may have done some chiropractic or acupuncture, right? They usually, by the time they come to me, have said, “Here’s the story. The story is I’ve done all of this stuff, I’m better than I was, but I’m still dealing with this and I can’t get back to doing the things I want to do.” This is where my story is. As I say, these people are stuck in the gap. The gap is they’re not really medical, but they’re definitely not go do whatever you want. They’re right here in the middle.

I have to bridge them and I have to figure out what the factors are that are stopping them from bridging. When they come in, I look for the factors. I wrote a digital book on this, which was really my contribution to looking at all the research I could find on what basically leads to the chronicity of pain, and those are the factors that you talk about a lot as well. It’s like we’re going to do a questionnaire. How well do you sleep? That’s the number one thing I care about. Number two, how much do you know about pain? Right?

Number three, all the other factors that contribute to causing problems in those two. How much caffeine do you drink? What do you eat? Do you drink water? What’s the basic stuff? Then we go into sorting out and figuring out what their beliefs are in pain. Now, because I found in my work, and let’s say I’ve been doing pain education for those who I’m sure are probably a good at number [inaudible 00:07:58] understands what that means. But in 10 years, I don’t think I’ve ever come across somebody who knows virtually anything about pain. A couple of people here and there may have heard about pain education before, but that’s it.

Their extent to their education is purely a structural mechanical explanation for why they have pain. Again, they’re here just thinking that we’re going to do another structural mechanical therapy. I have to teach them about that. Usually on the first visit, we schedule a little bit longer amount of time, but I start to educate them on this pain thing. I’m saying, “I know that you’ve had pain. A lot of these therapies have failed, but let’s talk a little bit about what leads to the chronicity of the pain. Because the people that you’ve seen so far, I want you to understand …”

Because some of them come in and they’re frustrated or angry with their healthcare practitioners, and I have to assure them, “Hey, these people are not idiots. They did their job and they did the things that were necessary to make sure that you’re safe. But now here you are with this lingering issue, and I’m going to explain to you why this is happening, what inputs are contributing to this so you can tell me which factors that I’m telling you seem to be relevant to your situation, and we can figure this out together.”

I think that conversation right away starts to dramatically shift the direction of the therapeutic work, and because we’re also … I really just don’t like having people walk in the door as a traditional practitioner, go put them on the massage table and start to get to work, because that’s the therapeutic work that’s working from the bottom up sending that information to the brain, but I have no idea how that brain is going to process that input. I have to get an idea of what is going on inside of there so that I can manage expectations, I can adjust my sensory input that I’m helping that person receive, so that their brain can reprocess their experience, and hopefully make the changes into the direction that we want to go.

It’s such a game changer that I almost like talking more about the front end process because it changes everything, and I really do think that with more of a proper front end process to most therapeutic protocols, they will work dramatically better. Now, of course, there’s a lot of techniques and so forth that can work better or less in different scenarios. But I think across the board, if we did that more on the front end, almost everything would work at least a good amount better.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Okay. Brilliant. Thank you for doing that. You mentioned education is paramount.

Sam Visnic: Yes.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Lifting that veil of fear and ignorance around, well, what the hell’s going on in their life, with all these therapists and they’re not better. I want you to pretend that I’m the patient. I’ve been through a year of rehab. I’ve been to all these different therapies. I’ve got chronic neck and back pain, had an MVA two years ago, and I’m saying, “Sam, come on, educate me because nobody’s telling me how I can heal.”

What would you say to me in this situation? You just give a classic … Nothing too extreme, but just the basics. How would you present that? Remembering that who we’re talking to today are people exactly in these situations where they’re likely sitting thinking, well, yeah, tell me because I need to know, right?

Sam Visnic: Yes. I think fundamentally, the big understanding that I start with is to help people understand that pain is not a thing. What it is is it’s an interpretation, it’s an alarm system that our nervous system has. It’s a byproduct or the end result of information processing. What I tell people is you don’t have any pain fibers in your body that we know of. What we have is we have nerve fibers that send information, and that information generally speaking is neutral.

Again, there’s some stressful types of information, but that’s not really the interpretation until it gets to the brain, right? We have this nociception in one particular way of putting it that goes to the brain. The brain has different quadrants that basically start to process that information. What is the quality of this information? What’s the intensity of this information? Do I remember this information from the past? We’ve all had that experience where you say, “Whoop, I felt that before, this means my back’s going to go out.”

I think if you’ve had that, you’re getting that part of the brain that remembers things. If you feel something you’ve never felt before that feels like a little bit of a strain or something, you might delete that. You don’t even think about that, right? This information has to get processed in different parts of the brain. The brain, those different areas, have to sit down at the meeting table and everybody gives their input and says, “What are we going to do about this? Is this threatening or not?”

If it’s threatening and it’s something that we need to take action on, then they all agree to turn the alarm on, and the alarm on is something that’s such a noxious signal, a noxious feeling to grab your conscious attention to tell you to pay attention and to do something. That is pain in a nutshell. But the brain, while it can make a decision to create threat, it can also make a decision to ignore it, and that’s the question. From there, we would talk about scenarios where we’ve always seen those CNN stories where some construction worker goes into the emergency room with a nail in his head and he doesn’t …

He’s completely, “What? What’s going on?” He has no idea what’s happening, but yet there’s clear tissue damage going on in an acute manner. [inaudible 00:13:04] feel it. Or I talk with people about those references saying, “Have you ever had a huge bruise that you found on your body and you didn’t …” What? What? I don’t remember this. There is damage. Why didn’t the alarm go off? Because at the time, your brain perceived that information to not be relevant.

We can, at the subconscious level in our brain, choose to experience things or not as threatening. The real question is what we want to determine for you throughout the course of this work together is to understand how your brain is interpreting that information and get it to stop doing that and to start doing something else. In that regard, this is a behavioral change program. How we do that is through lots of different modalities. I’m a massage therapist, so I’m going to use hands-on techniques.

Also, do a lot of exercise work, because unless you’re going to strap me on and take you home so I can massage you 24/7, there’s going to be some things that you need to be able to do yourself. The more you can help yourself, the more in between these visits you can start to break that behavioral pattern, send lots of safety information to your brain, and we can start getting your brain to do something different and reinterpret and evaluate the situation in a way that’s more productive in terms of getting you back to your life.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Because we need to reprogram the brain with safety as the fundamental physiological belief.

Sam Visnic: Yes. Some people will resist pain education because you could see them sitting there like, “Why is this relevant?” Then I show them a picture, [Adrian Lao’s 00:14:39] book for therapeutic neuroscience education. He had that piece in there. It was really great. I have a slide of it where I show the MRI of the brain. There’s a woman with chronic low back pain. They had her lay in an MRI, scanned her brain, looked at the brain activity and there was a lot of quadrants lit up. Then what they had her do is to move around in a way that agitated her back.

Then they rescanned her MRI. It was lit all over the place. Then took her out, did about 20 minutes of pain education, teaching her this stuff in a probably very limited way. Put her back in the MRI machine, and guess what happened? You see that brain nice and quiet, okay? Always reminding people that education itself is therapeutic. You will literally, not only when you just left brain logic understand things, but when you start to let that information permeate your awareness and you start to evaluate your experiences differently, it literally changes things.

That’s before we even get to the stuff on the table. One of the things I like to talk about a lot is chiropractic because I have a lot of people who have been to chiropractic before. It’s an easy thing. I say, “Hey, the first time you went there,” and the standard … Not all chiropractors do this, but telling you, “Hey, your back is out and we’re going to put it back in.” I’m like, “I don’t know about you, but that sounds terrifying.”

Backs just pop out, and what happens if you miss when you try to put it back in again? I’m like, “What did you feel when you did that?” They’re like, “I don’t know. I was weirded out by it.” I’m like, “It’s terrifying, right?” That raises some degree of threat, and the only reason why you were going to go along with this is because your friend told you that it was good or you had good reviews, right? There was a mix of emotions.

But what if they had told you that what they were doing to your back was like this. Couple of, “How’s that feel?” They go, “Well, that’s no big deal.” “I’m going to do that to your back and it’s going to feel good. It’s going to cause a change in these things called mechanoreceptors and all this stuff. It would be less threatening. Then when you lay on the table and you receive the therapy, would you be more relaxed if you knew what was going on?”

They said, “Well, yeah.” That’s what we want to do. We want to keep lowering that alarm system so that you feel less and less threatened by movement, by therapies and so forth that are safe. That’s just a perfect example of the more you know, the less threatened you feel, the less the alarm is going to fire and the better response you’re going to get from those therapies, even if this therapy is exactly the same. Yeah.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: People are listening today and thinking, okay, this is great, Sam. What are kind of resources, I know you’ve mentioned your ebook, but resources are really good and simple, maybe websites, that you’ve come across that would be really helpful for our audience to learn this? Because they’re probably on their own looking for answers and no professional’s actually pointed them in the right direction. What’s your recommendation for that?

Sam Visnic: Yeah. I think I’ve found a couple of YouTube videos and I have them and we’ll probably stick them in the show notes and whatever, but that have these nice cartoon drawings that talk about pain, and what’s actually going on and it gives you a nice visual representation of what’s occurring. I think those are fantastic. There’s a lot of pain education lectures online. They’re very long. I don’t think most people are going to sit through 90 minutes of Dr. Mosley talking about pain neuroscience. But if you want to, you can go with that as well. I also have a pain neuroscience lecture that I will give, a short lecture.

I think it’s about 35 minutes on a video that I can add as well. But simple stuff, just going through, and I feel like sometimes it’s just mind blowing having 15, 20 minutes of this for the average person who suffers from chronic pain, because that’s the reason why my book is called what it is. It’s like, “Why didn’t my doctor tell me that?” Because I have a number of doctors that I work with well, and they go to sit in conferences and so forth and they know all this. It’s just a matter of the communication that’s … Because of time, and I’m sure you know all of those other things that go on there, they’re like, “Wow, I wish I would’ve known this, because this seems very …”

But it’s also overwhelming. Small amounts at a time. Learn a little bit, think about it in terms of how it is showing up in your experience of your pain, and then learn a little bit more. It’s not something that necessarily you have to just have your head explode and read five books on this all at once, because it’s hard to process all of that. Especially if you’ve been in pain for a long time, there’s a lot of things swirling around to try to understand.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: It’s wonderful how when we do get a little bit of knowledge and then we take that forward, say, to our massage therapist or physiotherapy exercise and routine or kinesiology program, and then all of a sudden, it just builds and builds and you move forward in a compounding way, and all of a sudden you just take off, like what you’ve discovered in your career over the years. I think that’s important thing for patients and people to know, is it’s just small steps. It’s the only way to do it really, and it’s doable. It’s all doable for all of us to different degrees. Anything more to say with that?

Sam Visnic: Yeah.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Because that’s really is your baby, as people head off into this therapeutic world with new education.

Sam Visnic: I think that that’s a really, really critical point, is that there are sometimes that people will come in and the first session just changes everything. It’s like the veil has been lifted. I’ve had a couple of clients in particular. I remember one of them who had been told, “Hey, you’re never going to …” She was a swimmer and she was a collegiate level swimmer, very, very good, and she had a neck injury and she was told she would never swim again.

After reviewing her case and working with her, I was like, “Well, I don’t really understand why you were told this.” I had done pain education with her, and sit across from me and say, “Is it weird that my pain level’s actually reduced now since we’ve had this conversation?” I’m like, “It’s not weird, but that doesn’t give you a license to go out and go swim two hours right now. Right? We still got to do a graded exposure therapeutic program for you.” But it’s important to notice that that happened.

I think the next week that she came in, she had told me her pain had reduced 20%, 30% at that point, and she had tested and went out and actually gotten in the water for the first time in two years and she swam for about 10, 15 minutes. I did not tell her to do that. I was more like, “Okay, go slow.” I think within a week or two after that, she had about an hour swim, and she’s like, “I think we’re done,” and I’m like, “You might be.” That is not the usual case because there’s so much more that’s going on with most people.

But that happens. It can happen. But the average person is, like you said, a little bit at a time because we also … Pain is complicated, we know. It makes sense to us when we roll an ankle and your ankle is swollen up like this, our brain can square that up, “Well, that’s why I’m in pain. Duh.” But what happens when everything looks fine, but yet we’ve been told a lot of stuff, especially that there’s mechanically things wrong with us, and when we move, it seems to be very mechanical, even though I’m being told that it’s not mechanical, right?

It takes a lot of things like discussions and reviews of experience to break that apart. I think that sometimes even I’ve had discussions where people, where I say, “What’s the scariest movement for you to do?” They say, “Well, bending forward,” and I’m like, “Okay. Well, I want you to just go ahead and stand up,” and they stand up and I say, “Now, vividly imagine in your head bending over,” and they start to bend over and they go, “This is making my back hurt.”

I’m like, “You did not bend over. You thought about bending over, and just the thought of it was enough to fire your brain’s threat level.” How much of this is mechanical? How much of it is fear of there being a mechanical problem? That starts to go, “Well, I guess that’s an interesting thing,” and they’ll go, “Well, how much is it? Is it all in my head?” No, it’s not all in your head. You have fear and apprehension and it might be there because you do hurt when you bend forward, but we’re not going to know until we start to reduce the fear and apprehension.

Let me give you a graded version of forward bending that doesn’t actually move you into the zone where you feel threatened, and let’s do this for a couple of repetitions, a couple times a day, and see what happens over the next week. Oftentimes, they come back and they go, “I did it that way and it didn’t hurt.” “Well, how do you feel now?” “Well, actually my back feels a little bit better.” Okay. This is time. We got to learn to trust the experience. I also try to get people to not 100% trust my judgment.

They need to be able to feel the what’s going on inside of their body and work with that, because that is the way that … Especially with people with complex pain issues, I’m not there all day every day to help them with this and to reinforce these things. They’ve got to learn to work with their own nervous system and to feel whether that threat is really there for a reason or whether that threat is just their nervous system trying to protect them, and there’s really nothing going on there that they need to be concerned about.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: One question about your colleagues, and my colleagues as well, because I work with naturopath docs and I work with massage therapists and chiros and a whole holistic type approach environment. I’m just thinking, in the future, the way surely is for us all to be of knowledge of this, and then in our own little way, to be integrating and helping our patients deal with fear and some tips and this and that.

This maybe not, in the pure training, save a massage therapist, but their self learning. My question is, how would you recommend a massage therapist listening to this, who’s watched a few of those videos by Lamar Mosley or other [inaudible 00:24:23] Howard Schubiner’s got a few out right now. It’s great too, from Michigan. But they’ve watched a few of this and they … How do they integrate that so that their clients can move forward?

Sam Visnic: I think that there, first of all, is the challenge in most of these fields, from my perception, is there’s a tremendous amount of resistance right from the get-go, because this is just so unfamiliar. Because most schools of thought have really … People feel comfortable with what they have been taught to do, and this operates outside of that, and especially when there’s a lot of reinforcement of certain techniques. Especially in my world, it’s a lot about biomechanics.

When you challenge that with saying, “This is what’s really going on,” and that person might be spending a lot of time and energy and personal investment into things like [inaudible 00:25:15] about posture and muscle imbalances and so forth. They don’t know quite how to square all of that up, and that becomes a challenge for them to try to integrate this. I noticed this a lot early on in my field when I did massage school, and I was taking neuromuscular therapy courses at the same time.

There were a lot of colleagues of mine who were sitting in these courses with me doing neuromuscular therapy. This is very thorough work, very great work for people who haven’t had very thorough massage work done with chronic pain. Yet, when I’d follow up with them, most of these therapists had not gone toward the direction of doing neuromuscular therapy. Even though they took the courses, they were still doing spa-based treatments and massages, and they had a real hard time graduating into this because they couldn’t hold the space there.

To me, I said, “Just stop doing those other kinds of massages and start operating in the way that you want to operate. If you think that neuromuscular therapy is the thing that’s going to help people, then that’s what you do with your practice.” I think that leap oftentimes has to happen with things like the neuroscience education work, which is when you take this on, you’re like, “How else is this going to look in my practice? How am I going to implement this?”

I think that’s really hard to imagine sometimes without some degree of mentorship and working with somebody who’s already doing that, because it was hard for me to imagine this. Before I started teaching, I was like, “How do I teach people pain neuroscience on a first visit? How does this work?” I fumbled around a little bit, but I listened to some other practitioners, followed people that were actually helping me saying, “This is what I do on session one. This is what I do on session two” and trying to do that.

But I think I’m a type where I’ve learned something, I just start implementing it. I’m a little bit quicker to that, and I realize not everybody else does that. But you have to get a mentor to say, “Who’s actually doing this in practice?” And follow through with that. I think it’s very possible for massage therapists to start altering their language with their clients, at least. It doesn’t have to change what they’re actually doing. They could be doing all their massage techniques, but it’s the way that they’re speaking to people and being aware of what they’re reinforcing in terms of beliefs and what they’re trying to help move people toward that can be a little bit more empowering.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Yeah. I can relate to that a lot because as I jumped off the family practice bandwagon about five years ago and I was just purely doing trigger point injections and CBT or ACT, just different brain approaches to pain, and then I fell into this world of inflammation and food and supplementation and then cohort therapy and nasal breathing and the Buteyko breathing method, which I came across. I just, like you, just integrated it and start doing it.

You don’t really know what you’re doing to begin with, but one case and then the next, and before you know it, you’ve got a little system and you’ve done it once, you can do it again and it just keeps evolving. I think there needs to be that willingness to step out into the unchartered waters to an extent, but also getting a mentor is really important. Books and authors that you follow are pioneering. A lot of people have done it for years and years and years, and they just write it down in books. You’re not going to hear this in the medical literature, but you’re going to read it in books. That’s for sure. Jumping forward with that is really important.

Sam Visnic: It’s messy stuff. It’s not like … That’s been one of the things that … My wife is a clinical nutritionist and she’s probably the most experienced person I’ve ever come across now in the nutrition field just by the volume of patients that she sees, and her specialty is gastrointestinal problems, an inflammation. When we started having these discussions with her over time, and she’s taking a lot of this biopsychosocial information and translating this into nutrition practices, it just transformed everything for her.

In her way, the way that she has to implement this information is vastly different. We’re talking about the same thing, but trying to translate into how we communicate with people and then work within a team. But I can tell you one thing that’s been phenomenal is that when health practitioners are on that same page with that, it’s a lot easier to have discussions about biopsychosocial elements that feed down into the actual therapies than it is for health practitioners to argue back and forth about therapies and techniques, because we’re all just working on the same meta frame. You know what I mean?

Not sure exactly where I was going with that, but essentially just the idea of taking this framework and starting to do more integration and bringing things together, versus what the fields tend to do, which is to create more separation, right? Which we’re doing different things, and now all these factions have to fight against each other because their therapy or techniques are right and the others are wrong, rather than looking at everything. That’s what I’m far more interested in.

You see all these different therapeutic techniques and they always works sometimes. But the question is, what is amongst all of those techniques that when they are successful, what are the common elements? We look at those things as the research shows like therapeutic alliance is so important, dramatically influences the quality of the therapeutic work, building the relationship with your health practitioner, and those are the things that seemingly seem to get missed along the way, right?

Those are the things that are valuable and that we need to focus on as well. For me when I was taught that, those were game changers for me, and highlighted some of my weaknesses in the things that I needed to do a better job at. But again, I didn’t get to that point on my own. I had to learn that from other people, read lots of books. I wish the road had been a little bit faster. I’ve connected with people who had already done this a little quicker. But eventually, I’m getting there closer and closer.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Yeah, exactly. I think for people listening to this, if you’ve got a great therapist that you like, for whatever reason, ask them who do they refer to? What suggestions do they have, maybe outside their field? Because they most likely have got contacts and to go to that next level as well. Because I think once you open yourself up to solutions, like you and I have done, and as patients do, clients do, then solutions come to them. It’s just the way it works. Right? As long as you’re open, open doors will come, and we just need to know what the next step is in that path.

Sam Visnic: Yeah. For me, what’s moving forward with this is just further securing experts within their fields who think the same way, but are also just like that inch wide mile deep knowledge. Working with people is like who is the top person on sleep? Who’s the top person on orthotics? That person might go, “Why are you … I don’t know what you’re doing over here,” and I’m like, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll quarterback this situation and then I’ll send the client to you for this and send them back when they’re done, and I’ll take them to the next person,” all in the hopes of just continuing to work toward and get that person the elements that they need in order to complete their total health picture.

That’s always the challenge in the work, is just trying to find … I moved to a new area here. I’m in Temecula, California. I was in Santa Monica where there is tremendous amounts of health practitioners of all sorts. Here’s a little bit more challenging, but virtual visits and all of that stuff has made everything so great too. They give access to great practitioners. They’re a phone call away, and as long as you don’t need manual therapy, at least the consultations are good and help you set you forward in the right direction so that you can find somebody locally and you can ask good questions of that practitioner to get the services and stuff that you need.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Exactly. Okay. Just to wrap this up, any final thing you would love to share? Just maybe a story or an inspiration for people that are going, “Wow, that’s great for you guys, because you seem to know what you’re talking about. But I’m struggling back here and back and beyond.” Any comments for them?

Sam Visnic: Well, my biggest message that I always want to tell people out there who are dealing with chronic pain, especially because we oftentimes get to that point where [inaudible 00:33:29] saying, “I have tried everything,” and I will say you have not tried everything. Because everything is really not so much external. It’s not always the techniques and the so forth that you need. What it is is that understanding of pain and working within your own body.

The parts that you might be missing are the parts that maybe are so far into you like the cognitive behavioral therapy approaches. I’m a big fan of hypnotherapy, because it’s all about that connection with that part of your subconscious, that part of your nervousness which is feeling threatened. We just haven’t barely scratched the surface on how we’re going to be able to start working with, dealing with some of those subconscious factors. There’s a lot of techniques now that I think that are up and coming.

Again, hypnotherapy in particular, I think is going to make a huge, I’d say, resurgence as a … It used to be a popular therapy, and there’s tons of research on it. Mark Jensen out of the University of Washington is putting out a lot of information about that, as being a very valid therapy for chronic pain. I know you do the ACT therapy, right? These are things that a lot of people haven’t tried, or I don’t think they’ve fully participated and given it a good trial.

[inaudible 00:34:45] say a trial. What I’m going to say is … I think you can help me out here. But really getting into it, going full speed with it. I think that these things are the things that are probably the least utilized by people because there oftentimes tends to be a good amount of resistance to them. But I think those are the things that are going to be the most helpful, especially when people have felt like they’ve tried everything.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Perfect. Well, listen, I’m going to invite you back on the show to talk about this hypnotherapy, because I know that’s one of your passions and you’ve connected that as an additional approach to pain. I hope that you’ll come back, and let’s talk more. Anyway, Sam, it’s been great to have you on today. Thank you so much, and well done and congratulations for what you are up to in your life and how you’re just heart, soul and strength moving forward with the whole point of educating the masses, as well as helping heal the masses from their pain. Well done.

Sam Visnic: Thank you. Thank you so much for doing what you do. We’re all on the same page with this and trying to move this message forward. I feel like we’re pushing the rock or the ball up the hill here. At some point, it’s going to be mainstream. We’ll be able to help so many more people, but we’re still at the early stage of this. Of course, thanks for all your listeners for tuning into this too, and just being a part of this.

Dr. Wayne Phimister: Thanks so much, Sam.

Sam Visnic: Thank you.