Becoming Pain-Free: Jason Schuster On How to Alleviate Chronic Pain
An interview with Maria Angelova
Eat unprocessed foods and don’t eat too much: Most processed foods, basically anything not on the edges of the grocery store, contain a lot of stuff that is completely foreign to the human mind and body, evolutionarily speaking. Most of this stuff causes increased body-wide inflammation, which causes, and is a symptom of, chronic sympathetic hyperactivity.
So many people suffer from chronic pain. Often people believe that they have tried everything, and that there is no real hope for them to live pain-free. What are some things these individuals can do, to help reduce or even eliminate their pain? In this interview series, called “Becoming Pain-Free: How to Alleviate Chronic Pain” we are talking to medical professionals, pain management specialists and authors who can share their insights and strategies about how to alleviate chronic pain. As a part of this series we had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Schuster, PT, DPT, MTC, IAMTC, IADN Cert. Specialist; Owner and lead instructor of Intricate Art Spine & Body Solutions.
Intricate Art Spine & Body Solutions Website
Jason grew up outside of Boston and played division 1 ice hockey at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, where he received his Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art. 7 days after graduation, Jason began working as a fly-fishing guide in between Patagonia, Chile, and southwestern Alaska. After a decade of fly-fishing in the stunning beauty of Chile and Alaska, Jason returned to school and obtained his Doctor of Physical Therapy degree and Manual Therapy Certification (MTC) from the University of Saint Augustine in 2015. Jason and his wife Angela, a Marine veteran and Doctor of Physical Therapy, started Intricate Art Spine & Body Solutions in early 2020, with the goal of educating medical professionals and the general public about the potent ability of thoughtful dry needling combined with joint manipulation to regulate the autonomic nervous system toward homeostasis, the key to health.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I would love to. I grew up outside of Boston and played Division 1 ice hockey at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. I was a studio art major in college and continue to paint and draw as a hobby. I have even sold some works in the past. I started working as a fly-fishing guide at a remote, fly-fishing lodge in Katmai National Park when I was a junior in college. The only way to get to the lodge was to fly 400 miles over complete wilderness in a small float-plane to land on a river next to the lodge. The 4 months a year of the 11 seasons I spent in AK, I did not see power lines, pavement, or cars. Lots of fish though! And bears, lots of bears. It was totally awesome.
When I was not in Alaska, I spent the other 8 months of the year fishing and guiding on the opposite side of the equator, in southern Patagonia, Chile. I went to Chile after my second season in Alaska to help build a new fly-fishing lodge right at the base of the Andes Mountains, directly on the Pacific Ocean. I was 21 at the time, did not speak a word of Spanish, and knew 1 person in Chile, the dude who hired me. However, what I failed to realize was, the dude who hired me was living in California and was not going to be present in Chile. So, when I arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, speaking zero Spanish, I made my way by bus and hitchhiking, 1,500 kilometers south to a tiny town of about 800 people where the lodge would be located. Nobody spoke English. Like, zero people. So, I learned Spanish, quickly, by necessity, helped build the lodge, and ended up managing it for years, until a volcano erupted 1 kilometer behind the lodge, wiping the entire town into the ocean, leaving 4 meters of volcanic ash where the town used to be. We had to escape on a barge to an island off the coast of Chile. It was crazy!
Following this I got a job managing an eco-birding-lodge in the jungle of Belize. I was down there for 9 months, got malaria, was in a coma for 4 days, then returned to the states. That is when I decided to go back to school.
After receiving my doctorate from Saint Augustine, I worked as a traveling PT in rural outpatient clinics throughout the country. I met my wife Angela, also a DPT, while traveling in central Oregon. Angela and I created Intricate Art Spine & Body Solutions in early 2020, teaching the intricate art of melding dry needling and joint manipulation into a cohesive treatment to improve autonomic nervous system homeostasis and the health of our patients.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
Have you ever had a group of 70-plus-year-old patients, mostly husbands and wives, invite you to their farm to help trim their cannabis harvest after Physical Therapy? If not, try working in the mountains of central Oregon for a bit, this wonderful opportunity will present itself. This awesome experience happened to me right out of grad school. Now, I had already had a decade-long career of working as a fly-fishing guide in two of the most beautiful places in the world, and had some experience in this area. My wife Angela, the Marine, was not so sure, but she is awesome and agreed to come along to experience something new.
During my time as a fly-fishing guide, I had the pleasure of meeting a multitude of unique people, in an environment that was relaxing for them. This is key. Most of my fishing clients were successful, wealthy people with type-A personalities. You could really see it the first day or so after they got to our lodge in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Worrying about the internet connection, which was like dial-up quality. Worrying about if the satellite phone worked (it sorta did, sometimes, if it was nice and sunny). Worrying about all sorts of stuff out of their immediate control. It was always stunning to see their personality change after a couple days of worrying about how big a trout could a guy catch, rather than how to make the next dollar, or close the next deal. People open up to you when relaxed and respond better to treatment, secondary to a more homeostatic autonomic nervous system. Understanding people’s personalities and how to present them with a relaxing clinical experience is vital to maximizing patient outcomes.
Our patients had a lot of cannabis. It was awesome. Angela loved it (trimming it). We were trimming and talking about all sorts of things for 4 hours or so. It was amazing to see the personality change of our patients in a comfortable environment for them, compared to in the clinic. We learned so many amazing stories about their lives, and began friendships that last to this day. After seeing this phenomenon for years with my fishing clients, and witnessing the same thing with my patients, the importance of providing this type of environment in a physical therapy setting became glaringly clear.
Treating people as friends, rather than patients, and treating them as you would a friend, completely changes the dynamic in a medical setting. Unfortunately, very few medical professionals do this. It is just my personality to act this way and it served me well during my fishing vagabond years. Early in my medical career, I realized this concept is equally important in the clinic or classroom, as it is on the drift boat.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I was first starting, I was performing dry needling on most of my patients. I was very busy one day and got slightly distracted during a treatment at the end of the day, my last patient. I was needling her neck and suboccipital area. At the end of the treatment, I removed the needles and sent her on her way. The next treatment she came in and said, Jason, I was in the grocery store after treatment the other day and was scratching my head. And guess what? A needle fell out of the back of my head! At this point I had already peed myself… Then she started laughing hysterically. Hahaha, phew! Lucky she was nice. This is a good example of why one should never be too sure about themselves, especially in the medical realm. There are so many things that can happen, it is always good to humble yourself and approach everything with the utmost care and attention. Like always double checking you have removed all the needles!
When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
Intricate Art Spine & Body Solutions is a continuing education company focused on educating medical professionals around the country, and internationally, on how to improve autonomic nervous system homeostasis with the combination of dry needling and manipulative therapies. The overwhelming majority of people are living with chronic sympathetic hyperactivity. The human mind and body typically respond to stress, strain, trauma, etc., by elevating the sympathetic autonomic nervous system. Thoughtful application of the techniques we teach, dry needling and joint manipulation, are powerful, non-pharmacologic treatments that address a common underlying impairment at the root of almost all medical maladies, including chronic pain. Chronic sympathetic autonomic nervous system hyperactivity.
Needling combined with joint manipulation has an overall effect on the human mind and body of sympathetic depression and parasympathetic elevation compared to baseline, especially when targeted parasympathetic stimulation is employed. Targeting the auricular distribution of the vagus nerve, the primary nerve of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, with low frequency, 1–5 Hz, microcurrent induces up to 4 times the concentration of beta-endorphin from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a potent analgesic and autonomic nervous system regulator. Beta endorphin is a potent endogenous opioid important for pain regulation, immune function, and more. Needling combined with joint manipulation, both safe, non-pharmacologic treatments, should be utilized in the majority of all medical and mental health treatments. A more homeostatic autonomic nervous system helps your mind and body better deal with all medical impairments I am aware of.
Can you please share with us a few of the most common causes of chronic pain?
The most common cause of chronic pain is chronic sympathetic autonomic hyperactivity. Tissue healing from acute injury takes about 3 months, in general. Once the tissues are healed, in the absence of any specific causative factor, many people continue to experience pain. Sometimes that pain gets worse and travels to other parts of the body. Oftentimes, people suffer from chronic idiopathic pain, pain without any current, specific cause. A majority of chronic pain is of this variety. The mind and the body are intricately interconnected in the most complex system in the universe. Pain has been a widespread, common impairment for all of human history. Pain is also poorly understood, at best.
A primary reason for this is the mind and body are typically treated as separate entities when practitioners treat pain. The mind and the body must be concomitantly addressed with the specific goal of reducing sympathetic hyperactivity, elevating parasympathetic activity, and nudging the autonomic nervous system toward homeostasis. This allows the mind and body to use their incredible ability to heal themselves, and each other, to their maximum potential.
There are many different types of pain that people struggle with. Which specific form of pain would you like to focus on in this interview? Why that one?
Chronic idiopathic pain is one of the most common types of pain. Idiopathic means the reason is unknown. Now, the original cause of the pain may be known. However, chronic idiopathic pain is pain that persists following resolution of the initial insult to the body or mind, whether this is surgery, a car accident, traumatic emotional event, or something else. A super common example we see in Physical-Therapy-Land is pain persisting indefinitely following spine surgery. Three months, or so, is the typical accepted healing time for a relatively healthy person following tissue trauma. Theoretically, once the tissues are healed, the pain involved with tissue healing should go away. However, if the sympathetic nervous system has been pushed beyond its ability to self-regulate, the autonomic nervous system gets stuck in a nasty negative feedback loop of pain, tight tissues, tissue hypoxia, increase in pain amplifying chemical concentration, dysregulation of neuromodulators and hormones throughout the body and brain, further autonomic dysfunction, more pain, and the cycle continues.
A primary reason pain is such a poorly understood and treated common medical impairment is typical pain treatment does not address the cause of the pain. The actual cutting, breaking or healing of tissue does not actually hurt. What hurts is your brain’s interpretation of what signals it is receiving from said affected tissues. Most pain medications affect various pain pathways, but not the specific dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system causing the disruption of the pain pathway in the first place, being sympathetic autonomic hyperactivity with concomitant parasympathetic autonomic depression. This is particularly true in cases of chronic idiopathic pain. Theoretically, with enough practice and the correct mental control, you should be able to make yourself stop feeling pain secondary to any injury. In general, the more homeostatic your autonomic nervous system, the less pain you will experience. One of the most objective things we know about thoughtful dry needling combined with joint manipulation is the overall effect on the autonomic nervous system is sympathetic depression, parasympathetic elevation, and autonomic nervous system homeostasis compared to baseline.
Here is the main question of our interview. Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey toward becoming pain-free? Please give an example or story for each.
1 . Consistent exercise: Staying in good physical condition via consistent physical activity is the most sure-fire way to improve life and health-span. Overall, the underlying reason for this is people in better physical condition have a more homeostatic autonomic nervous system that is more resilient to insult. The reasons for this are numerous. This allows the mind and body to utilize their awesome, innate abilities to regulate and heal themselves and each other. Much of the time, the problem is not that our mind and body cannot heal, it is that they are somehow being inhibited from healing. This inhibition almost always involves chronic sympathetic autonomic hyperactivity.
2 . Eat unprocessed foods and don’t eat too much: Most processed foods, basically anything not on the edges of the grocery store, contain a lot of stuff that is completely foreign to the human mind and body, evolutionarily speaking. Most of this stuff causes increased body-wide inflammation, which causes, and is a symptom of, chronic sympathetic hyperactivity.
The effect of all the crap in most food people eat really hit home for me when I started living in Patagonia, Chile, when I was 21. Every store, all 1 of them in the town I lived in, contained 100% natural products. Bread, vegetables, meat, beans, rice, fish, etc. Nothing processed. The thing that shocked me was how fast real food goes bad! Like, in a few days. Then you start thinking about those French fries you found under your seat from McDonalds that still looked edible. Then you remember you hadn’t been to McDonalds in over a year… Scary…
3 . Consistent, skilled dry needling and manipulative treatment: Even in the absence of specific impairment, everyone should receive these treatments on a somewhat consistent basis. The consistency depends on many lifestyle, personal, environmental, and other factors. However, as a general idea, if everyone received needling and manipulative treatment once a month, with the goal of removing as much pathologic tissue from the body as possible, along with specific stimulation of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system to induce maximal autonomic nervous system homeostasis, the population would be significantly healthier. Remember, the overwhelming majority of humans are living with chronic sympathetic autonomic hyperactivity.
Our current medical system is in a sad state. It is a sick-care system, not a health care system. Currently, the medical model is to wait until people get sick, then give them expensive pills for life that don’t actually solve the problem, but rather just slap a band-aid on it. Anything that is safe, cheap, and effective, that prevents people from getting sick in the first place, like exercise, diet, skilled dry needling and manipulative therapy, are overlooked for anything the pharmaceutical companies can make a boat load of money off of. This even includes safe and effective medications those same companies produce, but are now off-patent, and therefore, cheap!
If everyone exercised, ate well, and received quality physical and mental, non-pharmacologic therapy on a somewhat consistent basis, the amount of sickness and suffering throughout the world would be immensely reduced. Unfortunately, these are some of the least expensive and least profitable forms of medical treatment, and even though they are potently effective in the right hands, they likely will never become mainstream in our current system.
4 . Seek out nonpharmacologic Mental Health treatment: My favorite form of psychotherapy I have tried, which I partake in on a regular basis, is Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. The method my therapist uses involves the hand-held paddles that vibrate and stimulate opposing sides of the brain. I have tried many forms of therapy and that one is the most effective for me. It also happens to be the only form of therapy I have ever tried that puts my mind in a state similar to that of a psychedelic experience. I have always found this to be extremely healing on my mind and body. Everyone is different and everyone responds differently to different therapists and different treatments. Consequently, it is oftentimes necessary to try out numerous practitioners and treatment styles to find the combination best suited to you. Combining physical and mental treatment, focusing on regulating the autonomic nervous system toward homeostasis, is vital to achieving maximal outcomes. The body and mind are intricately interconnected and should be treated as such.
5 . Psychedelic experiences. Psychedelic-Assisted-Psychotherapy and research into its potential uses and mechanisms of action is really taking off. And the results are nothing less than mind-boggling. Excellent universities such as Johns Hopkins have entire departments of their medical schools devoted to studying the effects of psychedelic-assisted therapy on mental health impairments. Recent and ongoing research is showing astonishingly positive results when using psychedelic-assisted therapy for conditions like PTSD, depression, anxiety, and others. Some of the most important realizations I have come to in my life have been when under the influence of psychedelics.
Note: Psychedelic experiences should be approached with care and in the correct setting. They are not for everyone, just like all medicine. Do your research and seek out medical professionals knowledgeable in this area to learn if this form of treatment may be right for you.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Men’s Pelvic Health. The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) has 10 board certifications. One of them is Women’s Health. Men’s Health is nowhere to be found. Like, anywhere in medicine. Without significant underlying pathology, like uncontrolled diabetes, structural damage, etc, nobody, men or women, should suffer from pelvic health issues like incontinence, pain with sex, erectile dysfunction, etc.
The problem is, most medical practitioners are not aware of the powerful efficacy dry needling and joint manipulation have on pelvic health. In men particularly, it is super easy to treat and resolve the majority of pelvic health impairment through regulating the autonomic nervous system toward homeostasis. Let’s take just 1 male pelvic health impairment. Erectile Dysfunction (ED). According to medical literature, about 40% of men the age of 40 have some form of erectile dysfunction. That number increases 10% per decade. So, 50% of 50-year-old men have some form of erectile dysfunction, and so on. According to the most recent data, there are 162 million men in the United States. 40 is basically middle-aged, and the average life-span in the US is about 78, so that means that about 80 million men in the United States are suffering from some sort of erectile dysfunction. That is just erectile dysfunction! Think about the numbers if you add in incontinence, pain with sex, and other common impairments! The vast majority of these problems are totally fixable with thoughtfully performed dry needling combined with joint manipulation, along with simple lifestyle changes anyone can make.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
I write weekly articles on various aspects of dry needling, joint manipulation, autonomic nervous system homeostasis, and how to naturally and effectively improve your health. Check them out at https://intricateartseminars.com/tag/blog/
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
