Howard Schubiner, MD: The Doctor Behind Unlearn Your Pain

Who is Dr. Howard Schubiner?

Dr. Howard Schubiner is a board-certified physician, a clinical professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, and one of the more published researchers in mind-body medicine, with more than 100 scientific papers to his name. He co-developed Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy, wrote the workbook Unlearn Your Pain, and directs a mind-body medicine program.

If you're here to check whether he's credible before you trust the method, here's the short answer. Yes. He's a practicing physician and a university professor, his approaches have been tested in peer-reviewed randomized trials, and he publishes his results rather than asking you to take them on faith. Your pain is real, and his work treats it as real. The detail is below.

How he got here

Schubiner came to this as a conventional physician. He encountered Dr. John Sarno's idea that much chronic pain is a mind-body process rather than ongoing damage, and instead of taking it on belief, he did what a researcher does. He built a structured program around the idea and ran it through trials.

That's what sets his work apart. He turned a clinical hunch into Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy and the Unlearn Your Pain program, then published the outcomes in peer-reviewed journals. The evidence, not the anecdote, is the point.

What he created: EAET and Unlearn Your Pain

Schubiner's central idea is that stress and unprocessed emotion can keep the brain's pain alarm switched on. His Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy, developed with psychologist Mark Lumley, helps people feel and move through those emotions so the alarm can settle. Unlearn Your Pain is his self-guided version, a structured program built around therapeutic writing, calm self-talk, and sensation work.

The approach is a close cousin of Pain Reprocessing Therapy and shares the same root idea that pain can be a learned, reversible brain pattern. We cover his book on our guide to Unlearn Your Pain, and the wider science on our neuroplastic pain page.

Howard Schubiner's credentials

Here's the factual record. Schubiner is a board-certified physician and a clinical professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. He directs a mind-body medicine program and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He co-developed Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy with Mark Lumley, and he was a co-investigator on the 2022 University of Colorado Boulder trial of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, published in JAMA Psychiatry. He wrote Unlearn Your Pain along with other books on mind-body health.

Is Dr. Schubiner legit?

By the measures that matter, yes, and more so than most names in this space. He's a board-certified physician and a university professor, not a coach with a website. His approaches have been tested in randomized controlled trials and published in respected journals, including a fibromyalgia trial of his own therapy and the landmark Boulder back-pain study he helped run.

The honest caveats, because both sides matter. His method is not a cure-all, and the strongest results are condition-specific, fibromyalgia and back pain especially. Plenty of people read the workbook, understand it, and still stall, usually because understanding the idea isn't the same as practicing it daily. And mind-body work belongs alongside medical care, not instead of it. None of that dents his credibility. It just means the method is a tool with real but bounded evidence.