If you have chronic pain, it can feel like there’s no end in sight for your suffering.

I got by for ten years, managing as best I could with medication, exercise programs, injections, massage, and meditation but nothing had a lasting effect – everything I did with my arms and hands was red-hot agony. It felt like the pain was mysterious and uncontrollable – until I stumbled across the work of Prof Lorimer Moseley and Dr David Butler and their must read book Explain Pain.

The science made complete sense to me – I’d instinctively felt that my nervous system was wound up tight. Understanding how I’d ended up in chronic pain was the first step – the next was working out what to do about it.

What I was specifically interested in was exposure therapy, safety signalling and danger identification. It took about a year of experimenting to put together the first version of flip* , which was called Brain Changer at the time. When I shared it with my health care team (a GP, physiotherapist and a pain psychologist) they told me it was brilliant and that I could help a lot of people.

My goal when I started was to fix myself – if I could help some others along the way then that would be a bonus. It took me a year of work to retrain my nervous system. I date my recovery from October 2016 when I worked my first pain-free, 8-hour computer-based workday. My tool wasn’t the sole reason for my recovery – I also took medication, exercised and meditated most days and checked in with my health care team regularly. I’d tried these strategies over the many years I’d lived with chronic pain, and it wasn’t until I added in a daily program of exposure, safety signalling and danger identification that I started to improve.

I still use flip* every day – either using the app or doing the work in my head. It reminds me to do lots of the good stuff and be accountable for where I focus my energy. My flip* work has also given me skills for life, for example, knowing how to avoid a new instance of chronic pain after I had to have surgery. And at the other end of the scale, knowing what to do after a massive fall off my mountain bike last year – OUCH!

I’m thrilled when I hear from our users who say we have changed their lives. And I’m pleased that something truly innovative has come from my many years of chronic pain and research.

I hope you’re strong with happy hormones!

Tina McIntosh
Founder & Managing Director