Who comes to ATNS
As we build the new website, it helps to have specific people in mind rather than a faceless mass of visitors. These three aren’t meant to represent every person who will visit, or the full range of who they are. They’re examples that help us think about what different visitors need.
Diane, 52 · The Skeptic in Pain
Diane is a high-school administrator with nine years of low-back pain, neck tension, and IBS flares. She’s gone through three MRIs that show a “borderline” disc, two rounds of PT, a cortisone injection, and a drawer of supplements. None of it helped. She runs her department, her household, and her mother’s care; she’s the one everyone leans on. She found ATNS Googling “IBS and back pain at the same time” at 11 p.m. She’s never heard the word “neuroplastic,” doesn’t believe pain comes from anywhere but tissue damage, and has been insulted by doctors telling her she needs to lower her stress.
- Every past diagnosis sounded authoritative and led nowhere, so she pre-discounts each new explanation.
- Being called “a bit of a mystery” feels like a verdict on her rather than on the limits of medicine.
- “Have you tried managing your stress?” feels like blame, as if the pain were a failure of willpower.
- She has shrunk her life around the symptoms and is grieving it without realizing it’s grief.
- She is exhausted from being the strong one in the family.
- Someone who can finally connect the dots, because she’s worn down by going from specialist to specialist.
- To be told her pain is real before anyone explains where it comes from.
- The mechanism and the evidence, because “trust me” sounds like a repeat of the last nine years.
- A private, low-cost first step she can take tonight without booking anything or telling anyone.
- “So you’re saying it’s all in my head.” To her, “psychological” reads as “imaginary,” or as an excuse not to prescribe pain medication.
- “If this were real, my doctor would have heard about it.” She suspects this is fringe.
- “This is just think-positive wellness stuff.”
- “I have a herniated disc on an actual MRI.” The structural finding feels like proof against the premise.
- “I don’t have trauma. My childhood was fine.” The emotion and ACE angle bounces off if it asks her to self-diagnose a wound.
- The “Most people assume…” opener names a misconception instead of accusing her.
- The line “it’s not in your head, it’s in your brain” reframes her pain as real.
- Because it is nonprofit and volunteer physician-led, no one is selling her a device.
- The anonymous two-minute quiz tells her about her own case rather than asking her to take a claim on faith.
- Recovery stories from skeptical, mid-life women like her help her recognize herself.
- A list of personality characteristics common in NS. Many with this persona will identify with those traits and will not have heard of this connection before.
- 12-Question Self-Assessment Quiz: private, two minutes, personalizes the site to her.
- Pain Science Paradigm Shift video: delivers mechanism and hope fast.
- A page for multiple co-existing conditions. The Back Pain and IBS pages each answer one symptom; a single page connecting the whole cluster through one mechanism is what would help her recognize herself. Visualize it with ATNS’s national-survey data: a word cloud where word size matches how common each symptom is, prominently featuring “Unexplained Symptoms” and “Not Improving as Expected.”
- “The Story Behind the Symptoms” podcast: the mirror does the persuading.
- Book: “They Can’t Find Anything Wrong” (David Clarke, MD): written for the patient told she’s a mystery.
Marcus, 38 · The Hopeful Self-Educator
Marcus is a product manager and former runner with four years of back and leg pain plus unexplained fatigue. A friend sent him Sarno’s Healing Back Pain. He read it in a weekend, downloaded Curable, and now listens to Nicole Sachs. Intellectually he’s all in, but he’s plateaued. He has good weeks, then a crash, then the fear that he’s “doing it wrong” or is the one exception. He journals sporadically and white-knuckles through flares. He’s done the books and the app. What he hasn’t found is people, a next layer of depth, and someone to tell him the plateau is normal.
- He gets the concept but can’t consistently feel the shift, and he reads that gap as personal failure.
- He has turned recovery into a performance metric, so the perfectionism that fed the symptoms now drives the recovery into the ground.
- He feels isolated. “My brain makes the pain” gets blank looks, so he’s stopped explaining it to anyone.
- Every crash reopens the fear that he has “real” damage after all.
- His learning is a patchwork with no sequence, so he never knows if he’s missing the one unlocking piece.
- Proof that setbacks are normal, so a bad week stops meaning the method failed.
- A sequenced path that tells him “you are here, here’s the next step,” to replace his patchwork.
- People mid-journey like him who can answer “is this normal?” from experience.
- Guidance to go deeper than he can alone.
- A trusted authority who can talk him off the ledge when doubt spikes.
- “I believe it, so why am I not better?” His doubt is about his results, not the theory.
- “Maybe I’m the exception and I do have something structural.”
- “I’ve read the books and done Curable. What could membership add?” He is information-rich but integration-poor.
- “I’ve already tried all of this.” If the site walks him back through the same books and apps he’s done, he’ll leave. He needs a fast route to next-level help: the member Q&As, the forum, and clearer guidance on treatment plans.
- “I don’t want to become a ‘chronic-pain person.’” Community can feel like conceding the symptoms are permanent.
- His scattered efforts and resources (Sarno, Curable, Nicole Sachs) finally get one home.
- “Two steps forward, one step back” reframes his setbacks as part of the process, not failure.
- The forum and monthly board Q&As break his isolation and give him somewhere to ask “is this normal?”
- The conference is a loneliness fix no app offers.
- The free first course and practitioner directory give him a trusted sequence and guidance past self-study.
- Membership: Forum + Monthly Q&As: community and board access that normalizes the plateau.
- Members’ Self-Treatment Course: the sequence that replaces his self-study.
- Practitioner & Coach Directory: guided help to go deeper than he can solo.
- “The Science Behind the Symptoms” podcast + research: what his analytical side grips during crashes. “The Story Behind the Symptoms” and “The Solution Behind the Symptoms” can also help this persona.
- 2026 ATNS Conference: the in-person fix for isolation.
Dr. Elena Reyes, 45 · The Curious-but-Cautious Clinician
Elena is a family physician with a frustratingly large number of patients she can’t help: the fibromyalgia, chronic back pain, IBS, and long-COVID fatigue cases whose workups come back normal and who cycle back unimproved. A colleague pointed her to the Boulder back-pain trial, and one of her own patients recently recovered in a way her training couldn’t explain. She’s intrigued but cautious, trained that pain or illness means injury or disease and wary of wellness fads. She wants the evidence, the words to raise this with patients, and proof she’s not the only physician taking it seriously.
- A significant subset of her panel has nothing she can offer them, and it drives her burnout.
- The neuroplastic approach creates a real conflict of belief, because it contradicts everything medical school and residency taught her about pain.
- There is professional risk in looking fringe to her colleagues.
- She has no script for raising it in a 15-minute visit without offending or oversimplifying.
- The mindbody field is full of hype, so she pattern-matches the whole category to “woo” and tunes it out.
- There is no billing code, no CME path she has found, and no time to add a competency.
- Hard evidence she can scrutinize: RCTs, effect sizes, and journals she respects.
- Proof that this is physician- and researcher-led.
- A script for patients, the words to raise this without triggering “you think I’m crazy.”
- A way to learn to do it herself, not just refer out: criteria, a treatment outline, and CME.
- Peers, clinicians and specialty groups, so she isn’t alone in this.
- “Where are the RCTs and effect sizes?”
- “This contradicts everything I was trained on.” Only science will bridge it.
- “How is this different from the dozens of mindbody products with no data?”
- “My patients will be insulted and walk out.”
- “Founded and led by volunteer physicians and researchers” signals serious clinical backing.
- The research and bibliography page gives her scrutiny-ready evidence.
- A patient-communication script, including “it’s not in your head, it’s in your brain.” (This is the line she gives patients, not what wins her over.)
- CME courses, SIGs, and chapters make it fit her constraints and connect her with peers doing the same work.
- The “rule out disease first” posture respects her caution instead of asking her to abandon it.
- Practitioner Self-Assessment Questionnaire: names the frustrating patient population and gives her an on-ramp.
- Scientific Research / Bibliography: the RCTs that pass her evidence gate.
- “The Science Behind the Symptoms” podcast: two physicians, peer-to-peer.
- Courses + CME: the learn-to-do-it pathway that fits her credits.
- SIGs + Chapters + Directory: peers, plus a place to refer now and list herself later.
- Jargon-free ATNS textbooks: Psychophysiologic Disorders and A Diagnostic Guide to Psychophysiologic Disorders.
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