
What one med student learned about chronic pain treatment from hundreds of honest, unfiltered responses on Reddit—and why it should change how we train physicians.
Learning about chronic pain is a depressingly low priority for US medical schools, despite the fact that pain is the number one reason that Americans access the health care system and the leading cause of long-term disability in the US.1 But as patient advocate (and my coworker at U.S. Pain Foundation!) Cindy Steinberg said recently at the 2025 American Academy of Pain Medicine conference, primary care doctors get less than 11 hours of education on pain throughout the entirety of their schooling. Vets– like for your dog– get triple or quadruple that.2 And pain medicine specialists? Chronic pain patients have them outnumbered nearly9000:1.3 Good luck.
Those of us with chronic pain often stay quiet or shrink our issues. We’ve all had to get very good at toeing an invisible line, fearing dismissal, stigma and judgment. That’s why I was excited recently to participate in a discussion online where a med student asked Reddit’s chronic pain community “What do you need me to know about chronic pain?”
I’m not sure if they were expecting the absolute flood of emotional, unfiltered, and eye-opening responses that followed. (As they later said, what they learned about chronic pain from Reddit “was a more authentic and raw exposure than what I received in medical school,” where their education on chronic pain didn’t include hearing or interact with any pain patients. ) But online is where the filters come off. It was a rare chance to speak directly to someone who was actually listening—and eager to learn.

Our overwhelming message? Please, just believe us.
But I wanted to hear both sides! So I reached out to the original poster, a current med student, to ask for their perspective Let’s dive into why they asked the question, the responses they recieved, and what they learned about chronic pain care. At the very least, they said, “I think this experience has opened me up to wanting to listen more to my patients with curiosity, without dismissiveness.”
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