Beth Darnall, PhD, is a Stanford professor, pain scientist, international speaker, evidence-based psychologist, and author.
I am Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director of the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab. I am principal investigator for $25 million in research awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Having lived through my own chronic pain experience, I create and investigate treatments that work alongside medical pain treatments and empower individuals to have best control over their pain and symptoms.
My innovations include ultra-brief, digital, scalable, low-cost pain treatments that are widely accessible to patients and easy for clinics to adopt.
Innovations
I created Empowered Relief®, a 1-session intervention that rapidly equips individuals with pain relief skills for chronic pain, acute pain, and for surgical recovery. Through Stanford University, we provide international clinician certification trainings. Empowered Relief® is being delivered in 26 countries and 7 languages. We have tailored the proven Empowered Relief® formula to meet the specific needs of various populations (e.g., surgery, acute injury, general chronic pain, prescription opioid challenges, youth, and Veterans).
Other key highlights
- Keynote speaker at national pain society conferences in the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, the U.K., and Switzerland.
- Three times testified to the U.S. Congress and once to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the need for whole-person patient-centered pain care and patient protections in accessing needed pain treatments and medications.
- Adviser to the CDC on the revising of the 2016 opioid prescribing guideline (2020-2021).
- Board of Directors of the American Academy of Pain Medicine (2021-2024)
- Scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (2021-2024)
- Speaker, 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
- Featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Scientific American, NPR Radio, BBC Radio, TIME Magazine, Nature, and others.
- Author/co-author of five books, including Psychological Treatment for Chronic Pain © 2018 American Psychological Association Press.
- Chief Science Advisor at AppliedVR, a digital therapeutics company that integrated my approach into an immersive, home-based pain treatment device that has been shown to impart lasting effects up to 2 years after use.
I advocate against broad, forced prescription opioid tapering for people with chronic pain, and in 2018, I led a letter to the U.S. Health and Human Services that published in Pain Medicine. In 2022, along with co-author Dr. Howard Fields, I published an open access perspective in PAIN® that provided evidence against forced opioid tapering.
Education
- PhD: University of Colorado at Boulder, Clinical Psychology
- Clinical Internship: Southern Arizona VA Health Care System
- Post-Doctoral Fellowship: The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health
To learn more about Beth, please visit her Stanford profile page or download a PDF of her CV.
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