Free Guides

Published May 28, 2026 · 4 min read

These are free neuroplastic pain guides. Neuroplastic pain is the kind your brain generates and keeps generating, even after the tissue has healed or when every scan comes back clean.

Most writing about chronic pain assumes the cause is structural. A worn disc. A misaligned bite. A joint that needs fixing. A large and growing body of research points somewhere else, to the brain. These guides pull that research together and put it in plain language. No jargon. No paywall. No email signup. Each one is a short, readable PDF that explains what the science actually says about a specific kind of pain, and what you can do with it.

They're written for people who've already tried the standard route. The treatments that were supposed to work, but didn't. If that's you, you're the reason these exist.

The files live on Issuu and the Internet Archive. That's on purpose. It means permanent, free access for anyone, with nothing to sign up for and nothing to hand over.

The TMJ Recovery Field Guide

The first guide is about jaw pain. It's nine pages, and it's built for one specific person. Someone whose TMJ hasn't budged no matter what they've tried.

You've worn the night guards. Maybe had bite adjustments. Maybe even sat across from a surgeon. And the pain is still there. This guide explains why that happens so often. The short version: for a lot of chronic TMJ, the jaw was never really the problem.

What's inside:

• Why disc displacement and other scary imaging "findings" show up just as often in people with no jaw pain at all
• What a 2023 BMJ review of 153 randomized trials found when it lined up the common TMJ treatments side by side
• How cognitive behavioral therapy actually compares to the standard night guard
• What the OPPERA study revealed about the link between TMJ and other chronic pain conditions
• A 7-question self-check for spotting brain-driven jaw pain, plus three things you can start this week

Who it's for: chronic TMJ that hasn't responded to splints, dental work, or surgery. If your jaw pain rises and falls with your stress, flares before big events, and quiets down on vacation, you'll see a lot of yourself in here.

More guides on the way

This is the first of several. Each one takes a condition where the research has quietly moved past the structural story, and spells out what that shift means for you. In the works right now:

• The Back Pain Recovery Field Guide
• The Fibromyalgia Recovery Field Guide
• The IBS Recovery Field Guide

Check back, or follow the publication archive linked below to catch new ones as they go live.

About the author

These guides are written by Tauri Urbanik, the founder of PainApp. He spent years digging through clinical trials after watching someone close to him struggle with pain that no scan could explain. What he kept finding was a gap. Solid research on brain-driven pain, sitting in good journals, almost none of it reaching the people actually in pain.

So he started building resources to close that gap. PainApp is one of them, and it's listed on AlternativeTo as a Curable alternative. These free guides are another. Tauri's full publication archive is available on the Internet Archive, where each guide stays free and permanent.

If you'd rather start with your own pain, PainApp has a free 3-minute assessment that looks at your patterns and tells you what the research suggests.