Coaching grounded in the modern neuroscience of pain — for people whose chronic pain has outlasted the injury, or who suspect there's more going on than tissue damage alone.
Book a free 15-min discovery callPRT is a mind-body method for chronic pain, validated by clinical research including the Boulder Back Pain Study. It works on the brain pathways that maintain and amplify pain — often long after the original injury has healed — by retraining how the nervous system processes danger signals.
People experiencing chronic pain — back, neck, headaches, fibromyalgia, joint, pelvic, and other persistent conditions. This includes pain with structural components, where mind-body work addresses the parts of the experience shaped by central nervous system patterns, fear, and avoidance.
This work is coaching, not medical treatment. I work alongside your medical team — physician, physiotherapist, specialist — not in place of them. Sessions are collaborative, focused on your specific situation, and aimed at returning you to the activities chronic pain has taken from you.
I'm Colin Talpos, founder of Ontario Pain Specialists. I work with people whose chronic pain hasn't responded to conventional approaches alone — those who've been told everything looks fine on imaging but still hurt, those whose pain has spread or shifted over time, and those who've been managing pain for years without a clear path forward.
My work is grounded in Pain Reprocessing Therapy and the broader mind-body literature on chronic pain, drawing on the work of Howard Schubiner, Alan Gordon, and the Pain Psychology Center. I don't replace the doctors and physiotherapists in your care team. I add a piece that's often missing: a structured, evidence-informed way to address the nervous system patterns that turn an injury into chronic pain — or that maintain pain after healing should have happened.
Sessions are virtual, available across Ontario. The first step is always a free 15-minute discovery call to see if we're a good fit, followed by a comprehensive assessment if we decide to move forward together.
PRT is an evidence-based, mind-body approach to chronic pain. It works on the brain pathways and nervous system patterns that maintain pain — often long after the original injury has healed. The goal is to retrain how your brain processes danger signals from the body, reducing or eliminating the chronic pain experience. It was developed by Alan Gordon and the Pain Psychology Center and has been validated in clinical research, most notably the Boulder Back Pain Study published in JAMA Psychiatry.
I work with people experiencing chronic pain across a wide range of conditions — chronic back and neck pain, headaches and migraines, fibromyalgia, joint pain, pelvic pain, and more. This includes pain with structural components, where mind-body approaches address the parts of the experience driven by central nervous system patterns, fear, and avoidance behaviors. The assessment is where we figure out together what's driving your pain and what can realistically improve.
No. I work alongside your medical care, not in place of it. If you have a structural condition, an active injury, or anything that needs medical evaluation, you should continue working with your physician and care team. PRT addresses a specific piece — the nervous system and behavioral patterns that contribute to chronic pain — that often gets missed in a purely medical approach. The two work well together.
The initial assessment is a 60-minute session where we go through your pain history in detail, talk about what you've tried, examine the patterns and triggers around your pain, and discuss whether and how this work might fit into your situation. Within 48 hours of the session, you'll receive a written treatment plan tailored to your case, with a clear sense of what working together would look like. Whether you continue with ongoing sessions afterward is your decision.
It varies. Some people experience meaningful change within the first few weeks; others take several months. The Boulder Back Pain Study showed substantial reductions in chronic back pain over an 8-week treatment course, but every person is different. Your treatment plan after the assessment will give you a realistic sense of timeline based on your specific situation.
The 15-minute discovery call is for exactly that — a low-stakes conversation to see whether this approach is right for you and whether we're a good match. If we both decide to move forward, the assessment goes deeper. If not, I'll point you toward whatever resource might fit better. There's no pressure either way.
Start with a free 15-minute discovery call. We'll see if this approach fits your situation, and figure out the best next step from there.