Why Clinicians Resist Changing Their Beliefs About Pain

Karen opens by asking Peter why his courses meet so much resistance at the start. His answer is that pain is deeply personal: we learn about it from our parents, from society's warnings about bending and lifting, and then from training that frames pain as a matter of posture, biomechanics and structure. Questioning those beliefs feels like questioning the person, which can trigger a backfire effect. Peter points to research using implicit association tasks showing that physiotherapists who say lifting with a round back is safe still implicitly see the back as vulnerable. Confirmation bias then keeps reinforcing what clinicians already believe. He explains why his workshops bring in real patients who have not been helped by traditional approaches. Education alone often changes little, but listening to someone's story lets clinicians step into their shoes and see pain as multidimensional. Karen then introduces her own history of severe neck pain, which sets up the live interview that follows.