Chronic overlapping pain conditions represent one of the most prevalent and neurologically complex challenges in contemporary clinical practice. Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic migraine, tension-type headaches, endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, temporomandibular joint disorders, chronic low back pain, and vulvodynia collectively affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Despite their prevalence, these conditions have historically been underserved by conventional clinical frameworks, partly because they resist objective diagnostic confirmation and partly because the central sensitization mechanisms driving them have not been widely integrated into clinical training. This course addresses that gap directly, giving licensed clinicians a rigorous, research-backed neuroscience framework for understanding why these conditions exist, why they overlap, and what the nervous system is doing to generate and sustain them.

Through the clinical lens of functional neurology, this course reframes chronic overlapping pain conditions not as medically unexplained phenomena, but as coherent neurological events rooted in microglial activation, neuroinflammation, dysregulation of the threat response, and maladaptive changes across the neuraxis. Clinicians will explore how the insula, basal ganglia, amygdala, and dorsal root ganglia each contribute to distinct COPC presentations, why adverse childhood events and chronic psychosocial stress prime the central nervous system for sensitization, and how the same shared symptom pool manifests as different diagnostic labels depending on which area of the nervous system carries the heaviest inflammatory burden. The course draws on peer-reviewed research published since the NIH established the Chronic Overlapping Pain Conditions working group in 2011, including studies on long COVID as an emerging central sensitization syndrome.

This course is designed for licensed healthcare clinicians, including chiropractors, chiropractic neurologists, physical therapists, and other functional medicine practitioners who regularly encounter patients with chronic, treatment-resistant pain presentations. It is particularly valuable for clinicians who want to move beyond symptom-management thinking and toward a neuroscience-informed model of assessment and clinical reasoning for this population. No previous specialization in pain science is required, though clinicians with background in functional neurology will find the material immediately applicable to their existing practice frameworks.

Dr. Norman Hoffman is a chiropractor and chiropractic neurologist with advanced training in functional neurology. His clinical and educational work focuses on the intersection of neuroscience and complex chronic conditions, translating emerging research into frameworks that practicing clinicians can apply immediately. His teaching approach is evidence-grounded, mechanistically rigorous, and clinically oriented, reflecting years of practice with the patient populations most underserved by conventional diagnostic and treatment paradigms.