He Told Everyone How Much Pain He Was In. The System Still Said "Prove It."

[Source: "694 Video Diaries, One Message: The System Failed My Dad," produced by Brittany Wagner and Alexander Stockton. The New York Times Opinion Video, Sept. 17, 2026. Watch it here: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011123876/694-video-diaries-one-message-the-system-failed-my-dad.html]

If you have to prove you hurt...how can you get better?

Meet Michael Wagner. Carpenter from Ohio. Fell 35 feet when a lift failed under him on the job. He and his nervous system never recovered.

Here's what REALLY frustrates me: he told people.

Loudly.

Repeatedly.

On the record.

He told his employer. He told doctor after doctor, more than twenty of them. He told the government agencies literally built to catch someone exactly like him. He said it in journals. He said it in appeals. He kept saying it, right until the videos stopped.

And almost nobody believed him.

It took eighteen years, workers' comp fights, disability denials, and imaging that kept coming back "fine," before doctors finally found deterioration in his spine and put a name to what he had been feeling the whole time: chronic pain syndrome. Eighteen years of "you look okay, so you must be okay."

Suddenly his pain makes sense because a "scan showed something"?! Heartbreaking...

He left 694 videos for his daughters, recorded on an old iPod Touch, explaining exactly how the system failed him. His daughter Brittany turned them into a documentary with The New York Times.

Please watch it. The link is at the top of this post.

His voice does something my retelling never could. And his voice IS the most important one.

A clean scan is not a lie detector

Here's a truth I say out loud in nearly every session I run: hurt does not equal harm.

A scan that comes back "unremarkable" tells you the imaging machine did not spot damage. It does not tell you the person isn't in real pain.

ALL pain is real.

Tissue damage and pain are not synonyms.

Pain is an output of the nervous system, not manufactured by an X-ray. A nervous system that has been sounding an alarm for years does not need a visible tear or fracture to keep sounding it, loud and clear.

Michael's imaging looked fine at first. He did not look fine. Guess which one the system believed. UGH.

Alone in a room full of people who loved him

Michael was not isolated because nobody cared about him. He had daughters who adored him, who kept every single one of those videos. He was isolated in a much sneakier way: unheard, exactly where it mattered most.

That is what I want to highlight, because it is not rare. It is the default setting for a lot of the people I work with.

Told, and not believed.

Present, and unseen.

Dismissed repeatedly.

Where I Start

Before I explain a single thing about how pain works, before I discuss a new tool or idea, I start in one place, every time: I believe you.

Not to be nice. As the actual door. Nobody can take in new information about their pain while they are still spending energy proving the pain is real in the first place.

Chronic pain does not mean permanent pain. That is true, and it is also not where the work starts. The work starts with someone hearing "I believe you" and actually meaning it.

If that is you right now, feeling like you have said this a hundred times and it still has not landed anywhere: I believe you. Full stop.

If you love someone in pain, or you are the professional they are sitting across from, skip the fix for one minute. Lead with belief. Everything else gets easier to hear after that.

Content note: this post references suicide connected to unaddressed chronic pain. If this is hitting close to home for you, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is there any time, day or night.