It Doesn't Have to Hurt : Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life

Winner of the Nautilus Book Award!

Free yourself from chronic pain with the latest science-backed techniques and expert practical advice from America’s neurosurgeon and bestselling author of Keep Sharp, Sanjay Gupta.

Are you one of the fifty-two million people who experience chronic pain in day-to-day life? In It Doesn’t Have to Hurt, Sanjay Gupta makes the powerful argument that you can start practicing effective options for relief today to greatly reduce your chances of suffering pain tomorrow.

Gupta shows how pain is not just physical but social and emotional as well. Hard to treat, and too often ignored, it can present in infinite ways. Yet while both patients and practitioners focus on fixing pain problems with drugs or procedures, it turns out we have tremendous agency in choosing how we respond. The brain “creates” pain, but it also has the extraordinary capacity to make it go away. It Doesn’t Have to Hurt shows exactly how.

Gupta covers conventional treatments, such as mobilization, exercise, analgesia, and treatment (MEAT); acupuncture; trigger point injections; and “prehabilitation” before operations, as well as more recent techniques such as mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM) and myofascial therapy. He shares how to make sense of all those over-the-counter pills, patches, and pain products, as well as drugs advertised on television or prescribed by your doctors. He addresses psychedelics, supplements, and CBD. And he highlights insights from some of the nation’s leading pain scientists and specialists, plus stories of challenge and triumph over pain by those with lived experience.

With expert guidance and a wealth of science-backed strategies, It Doesn’t Have to Hurt is your ultimate resource for reclaiming your life from chronic pain and unlocking a future of lasting relief—starting today.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta is CNN’s Emmy Award–winning chief medical correspondent and the host of the acclaimed podcast Chasing Life (formerly Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction), America’s go-to resource for expert advice on how to stay healthy and safe. The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Chasing Life, Cheating Death, Monday Mornings, and Keep Sharp, Dr. Gupta lives in Atlanta, where he works as an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University School of Medicine.