Where is your chronic pain truly coming from?

By: Peter Stamos

When Pain Never Seems to Heal: My Story and What I Learned

If you’re dealing with long-standing injuries that never seem to heal, this is for you.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many people in pain. Some improved quickly. Others didn’t respond the way I hoped. Those “unsolved” cases pushed me to look deeper for better answers—and they’re a big part of why I’m sharing my own story.

From Healthy Athlete to Chronic Pain

I grew up playing a variety of sports and stayed generally healthy. After high school basketball, I tried to continue playing in college. That’s when I ran into real trouble.

I sustained an injury that wouldn’t go away. I stopped playing, saw multiple doctors, and had the usual workup—MRIs, ultrasounds, physical therapy. Nothing clearly explained what was wrong, and nothing created lasting change.

I eventually took almost a full year off to rest. When I finally returned to the court, the same injury came back in a short period of time.

Most of my twenties followed a similar pattern:

• I’d start training or playing sports again.
• I’d get hurt.
• Then new injuries would show up in other areas of my body.

Over time, these issues stacked on top of one another and turned into dysfunction throughout my entire system.

When the Usual Models Don’t Fit

Frustrated, I decided to pursue more education and consult additional medical professionals. Based on how my body was presenting, I knew I wasn’t a simple case.

I didn’t fit neatly into any one model or textbook diagnosis, and that made it harder for people to help me. As I learned more and listened to different experts, I started shifting my focus away from just the injured joints and muscles and toward the structures from the neck up.

I began with my jaw. I worked on my bite and went through Invisalign. That created some improvement, but it didn’t fully resolve the pain or the strange patterns I was feeling throughout my body.

A Clue From Childhood: My Eyes

The next professional I saw was an optometrist.

When I was seven, I’d already had vision problems. My parents took me to an eye doctor because I couldn’t track the baseball being thrown to me. Instead of wearing my glasses consistently, I just switched to larger-target sports like basketball.

Looking back, that choice mattered more than I realized. My vision continued to deteriorate and began to affect how my entire body functioned.

As a kid, I noticed things that didn’t make sense. For example, I couldn’t jump off my left leg at all, so I became a two-footed jumper. As a right-handed athlete, most people naturally jump off their left leg—it’s usually the stronger plant leg for right-handers. No matter how hard I trained or tried to “fix” my left leg, it remained basically useless for jumping.

Finally, the Right Diagnosis

When I finally found the right specialist, I was diagnosed with visual suppression in my left eye and convergence insufficiency.

In simple terms, my left eye had essentially checked out, and my right eye was doing almost all the work.

This imbalance forced my body to compensate in very specific ways. For example, if I stared at a target for a while, my right eye would try to move closer to it. To help that happen, my head and neck would rotate to the left.

My eyes were quietly running the show.

No matter how creative or complex my movement drills were, they couldn’t override what my visual system was dictating. I was asking my body to move better without addressing the faulty “software” controlling the movement.

The Bigger Lesson: Sometimes the Problem Is Higher Up

If you’re stuck in a cycle of chronic pain, it’s easy to keep chasing the same muscles, joints, and body parts that hurt.

But here’s the key lesson from my experience:

The source of your pain isn’t always in the area that hurts.
Sometimes the real problem is higher up—in the eyes, jaw, vestibular system, or other parts of the nervous system that tell your body how to move and stabilize.

In my case, unresolved visual issues led to years of compensation, strange movement patterns, and injuries that never fully healed.

If your story sounds anything like mine—pain that comes back, injuries that keep moving around, or a body that doesn’t fit the usual boxes—it might be time to look beyond the obvious and consider what’s happening from the neck up.