Watch my introduction video for more information about me.
Hello. I’m Dr. Emmett Smith.
My team and I would like to personally welcome you to Becoming Like Water, a website dedicated to helping you learn how to hurt less, and to manage your pain better. There are no cures for severe to intractable chronic pain, but there are proven self-care techniques that can help you to both survive and thrive despite the incredible challenges that you face every day. You may know of some, but you have probably not learned all of them, nor how to put them together in specific steps that work synergistically in order to help you manage your pain better.
I am a doctor of Oriental Medicine, and I have 20 years of experience as a specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of pain. Like you, I’m also living with intractable pain, and I have been for the last 35 years.
Whether you are living with the challenges of fibromyalgia, long Covid, migraine, sickle cell disease, endometriosis, the torment of one or more surgeries that went wrong, or other forms of pain, life with pain is very much the same for all of us. We struggle to get through our days, and we usually have trouble getting enough sleep, and enough rest. Our digestion is often a problem, and we feel stiff and sore, sometimes to the point where movement is a torment all its own. Our lives are a struggle. We know, because we live with those things as well.
After my 2nd disabling motor vehicle accident, I had to develop a program for myself that took me out of my wheelchair and provided me with a path that eventually allowed me to return to a more productive life; one that let me start working with others in our community, and which helped them as much as it has myself.
If you’re like me and my team was, you’d wished that you had a truly effective self-care program, and a greater knowledge of the principles and techniques of self-care; and that you had access to low-cost training in all the options that could help you to minimize your suffering, and that you let you learn how to control your pain better without ever leaving your home. We want to help you fulfill that desire.
I took the best protocols from my decades in clinical work and put them into a logical, sequential program using approaches that have worked for millions of people in pain. It’s based on well-known medical principles that unfortunately aren’t being taught to most pain patients, due to the time constraints of our various modern healthcare systems. We want to change that paradigm for you
The Becoming Like Water program sets you on a personal journey that guides each member of the chronic pain community along a path to better pain management and greater comfort. It will aid you in designing and following your own best self-care practices in order to achieve the greatest improvement in your own level of pain management.
Welcome to a new way to manage pain, created by a pain patient and run by pain patients. My team and I will do everything we can to help you craft a better, more comfortable life. There is no cure for chronic pain – but there are many ways to help you manage it better. Please look inside, and see if the Becoming Like Water program is right for you!