Curable App Review
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What is Curable?
Curable is a pain psychology app. From their website:
“The Curable app provides evidence-based chronic pain lessons in your pocket. It uses a combination of pain science education and research-backed techniques to address pain from every angle.”
I used it for a full year and I want to give my feedback on it, because I know a lot of people with endometriosis are curious about it. I liked it and recommend it, but I also know that there are people who don’t like it and that’s ok too. Not everything is for everyone – it helped me in a time of my life when I needed it.
I came across Curable post excision, once I no longer had my excruciating endometriosis pain flares, which disappeared after I had excision surgery. I did still have full body fibromyalgia pain and IC bladder pain at that time, although they had reduced post excision. I was dealing with then was MCAS symptoms and stress was one of my worst trigger, so I thought that finding safety in my body and with my symptoms could help them.
What I liked
It didn’t require a big time commitment
The lessons are short, some 5-20 min, so they were easy to carve out time for a few times a week. Soon I found myself doing them daily because they became something I could turn toward during moments of high symptoms.
The panic button
There’s a panic button for when your symptoms spike, which tries to help you ground yourself through breathing. When I pushed the panic button, it feel like I had instant support. This helped me to breathe deeply and remain calmer during a flare instead of spiraling. I turned to its guided visualizations during histamine-induced anxiety attacks, nights of insomnia, and when I felt emotionally triggered.
The pain science was helpful for more than just chronic pain
The pain science has a focus on getting you out of heightened alert and fear, which are two states that having endometriosis put me into often. Even though I wasn’t using the app for pain specifically, I found the info on how perfectionism, repressed emotions, and anything that makes you subconsciously feel like you are in danger to be very helpful. I felt that fear was my way of relating to the world, as I was in a constant state of hypervigilence, and that being in fight-or-flight so often was exacerbating my symptoms. In my early twenties, I had made progress calming my nervous system through yoga, qigong, meditation, and painting. This helped lessen my bladder and bowel urgency/frequency, which at that time were out of control and having a detrimental impact on my life. So I already had an experience where moving from constant fear to more feelings of safety had improved disabling symptoms. But for me, it wasn’t until I did guided meditations, journaling, and other exercises specifically aimed toward chronic pain – and in a broader sense, my overall symptoms – that I saw a real breakthrough in calming my overactive fight-or-flight response.
What I didn’t like
There wasn’t anything I personally didn’t like, but something I think turns off some people with endometriosis to the app is that it’s aimed toward people who have central sensitization or mind-body pain – basically pain in people who have no structural damage causing their pain. Rather they have a sensitization of their system or misfiring of the brain (learned pain pathways) that’s causing their pain.
A message throughout the app – and among the practitioners I follow doing various types of somatic tracking/ pain reprocessing therapy – is that after you get checked out by a doctor, you need to trust that your pain is not from any physical source. This helps with pain reprocessing because when you believe your pain has a structural cause, it can keep the brain in high alert. Since pain is a danger signal, fear can keep you trapped in pain, especially if you believe you will never heal your pain because your body is damaged in some way.
Those of us with endometriosis know that it can be dangerous to accept that our pain is not from any physical source – that’s what doctors told us for years as they dismissed us when all tests were normal. These doctors all supposedly “ruled out” physical causes for our pain, completely missing endometriosis. This is one of the main reasons why it takes an average of 8+ years to diagnosis, because doctors don’t recognize the symptoms of a very real disease. Health conditions that primarily affect women and people assigned female at birth have been notoriously underfunded and this contributes to diagnostic delays. Even in diseases that affected all sexes, there’s often more studies on that disease presentation in males, and the presentation in females often isn’t well known or recognized by the medical community. A great example of this is how the symptoms of heart attacks typically present in females! It’s also true that due to racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and more systems of oppression, depending on our identities, it can lead to outright dismissal and denial of care that we deserve and need.
After years of medical gaslighting that led to trauma, and physical and emotional harm coming from being incorrectly told that our pain has no structural cause, hearing this message repeated over and over in a pain app can be very triggering and infuriating. I reminded myself upon hearing it that my pain does indeed have some structural causes, and that statement was not directed at me specifically.
Using the app with an open mind
When starting Curable, I had soften to the idea that I may or may not have central sensitization/ learned pain pathways as one of my pain and symptom puzzle pieces.
I began using Curable with hope that the app would help me in some way, but without any sense of desperation or attachment to the outcome. I think that’s important because desperation often makes us feel stressed or anxious, and my understanding with this app is one of the goals is to stop going into fight-or-flight about my symptoms. I made a commitment to use the app curiously and with an open mind: it may or may not help my pain, but surely I could learn something about myself and the way I approach and respond to my symptoms. Which ultimately, if my symptoms didn’t improve through use of this app, I’d still have to live with them daily – so improving the way I live with them would be a welcome change! Who doesn’t want to have less fear in their life, and more peace and emotional freedom?
I used the app as an additional component to my treatment, not in place of it
While using Curable, I continued looking for expert care and any additional causes for my pain. Many patients with endometriosis have multiple contributing factors to their pain, such as the lesions themselves, pelvic floor dysfunction, and adenomyosis. No amount of pain reprocessing or downregulating your nervous system can take the place of a surgery for a kinked bowel or separating organs that have fused together.
What results did I get from the app?
About 3 months into using Curable, my full body fibromyalgia pain disappeared. However, leading up to that time, I treated suspected SIBO with 5 rounds of anti-microbials, so I don’t know whether it was Curable or the SIBO treatment or the combo that helped me. It’s been 4 years since then and I’m still pain free.
Either way, the app taught me a new and better way to approach my symptoms, even if it wasn’t what led to me being pain free. I now understand what kinds of thoughts and tendencies subconsciously trigger fight-or-flight in me, and how to bring feelings of safety back to myself when I’m triggered. Even if being triggered doesn’t lead to pain or symptoms, it certainly makes my experience with life situations more uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing.
In conclusion
If you are going to use the app, have an understanding of why endometriosis can cause pain. For many people with endometriosis, there are multiple puzzle pieces to their chronic pain as well. My goal was to better understand the mind-body connection with my pain and have a better emotional experience during my flares. And if it ended up reducing my actual pain/symptoms, then fabulous. And if it didn’t, that was okay too.
On Curable’s website, they say that “the best results will come from using the program at least 2-3 times per week for the first couple of weeks.”
“You may see results related to the improvement of your quality of life shortly after you start using the app. For lasting pain relief, it varies. We have seen people find total relief within a month, and we’ve seen others get 10% better every month for many months. In general, though, from a survey of Curable users shows that about 70% experience some degree of relief from their physical symptoms after 30 days of continued use.”
If you are using the app and it isn’t helping to diminish your symptoms, this might not be the puzzle piece you need right now. Maybe this puzzle piece will help more after you treat structural causes to your pain, through excision or PFT. Or maybe the app won’t help your physical pain but will teach you tools to cope better during a pain flare and have a better pain experience.
It’s hard to emotionally invest in another healing modality when we’ve likely been trying different activities and lifestyle practices ever since we got sick. Because I felt like learning specific techniques for finding safety in my body would help me, and I paid less than $50 for a full year subscription, it felt like a low risk, fitting next step. However, like I said previously, it’s not for everyone, so I encourage you to look at their website and Instagram and see if it sounds helpful to you.