The Peter Attia Drive · 2025-04-21 · 167 min · 29,318 words

#345 ‒ Chronic pain: pathways, treatment, and the path to physical and psychological recovery | Sean Mackey, M.D., Ph.D.

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads.

To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterateiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Dr. Sean Mackey.

Sean is a professor of pain medicine at Stanford University. He also serves as the director of the Stanford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab. His research focuses on the neural mechanisms of pain and the development of innovative treatments for chronic pain conditions. In this episode, I talk a little bit about how Sean and I go way back and why it is that I really wanted to have Sean on this episode. In this episode, we discuss the definition of pain as both a sensory and an emotional experience and why it's fundamental.

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