So I am not sure how to "thank" posters or give hugs or any of that yet. I tried to thank you, but am pretty sure I got it wrong.

Aaaanyway, thanks for the share. I struggle with chronic illness with a large pain component, as well as mental health stuff like anxiety and depression that go hand in hand with chronic illness. But I have also had my share of traumatic emotional... I'll call them, experiences (which seems like the understatement of the century, but I digress). My point is that I recognize that my conditions have a huge mental/emotional component. Ex. If I get really stressed about anything from the death of a close friend to an exciting vacation I have been planning, I am guaranteed to trigger a migraine. The best I can do is try and manage the stress, which sometimes means deliberately dissociating from the trigger (I am that seemingly cold person who never seems excited about anything and never cries before or during a funeral - for this reason) long enough to get past the event, before the migraine kicks off. Its weird, but it is what it is. Took me years and a lot of regretful absences from important events before I figured that out.

That is the same for my Interstitial Cystitis. Stress => flair up. Every single time without fail. My disease processes are like stress-o-meters. Lol.

The biggest trouble I have come up against for dealing with the medical establishment is that even acknowledging a causal link is regarded as me admitting that my health issues are psychosomatic. Seriously, like I thought my spinal stenosis into existence or something. Maybe I just didn't believe strongly enough. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic here, but its a fine line I guess. In my experience, the war on pain patients (aka. The opioid crisis) means many physicians (and lawmakers) are looking for any excuse to minimize, marginalize, and invalidate people coping with painful conditions, so they can call admissions of pain "drug seeking behavior", or better yet, say its "all in our heads" and send us off to therapy.

I am already in therapy, because I genuinely believe there is a huge benefit in using every resource available to mitigate my pain, and that includes CBT and relaxation techniques, along with a lot of other things. I tell you what, if you live with severe pain every day, you will try just about anything to manage it, not just narcotics. Pills are just one more tool in a very large and varied toolkit. Trouble is, when powerful groups are looking for evidence with a strong confirmation bias, research like this may be used to invalidate patients' individual experiences with pain and pain generators.

Sorry to go off on a tangent... its a bit of a touchy topic for me, but I still find it really interesting and helpful to read articles like this. So, thank you again for sharing.