About Beth Darnall

Beth Darnall, PhD is Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine. As Director of the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab, she leads NIH and PCORI-funded clinical trials that broadly investigate behavioral medicine for acute and chronic pain, including a $9M multi-state trial on voluntary patient-centered prescription opioid reduction.
She strongly advocates for patient protections related to opioid prescribing, including iatrogenic harms associated with forced opioid tapering.

Her team develops and investigates novel pain treatments that are scalable, effective, and low burden. Her single-session skills-based pain class, “Empowered Relief” is available in three languages and in healthcare systems throughout the U.S., and in Australia, U.K., Denmark and Canada. Digital therapeutic innovations include on-demand, skills-based, self-regulatory treatment for perioperative patients, and virtual reality for acute and chronic pain.

She twice briefed the U.S. Congress on the opioid and pain crises, and provided invited testimony to the FDA on iatrogenic harms associated with opioid tapering. She is an invited scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, a federal advisory committee created by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to enhance pain research efforts and collaboration across the government, and advance the fundamental understanding of pain and pain treatment. She is a scientific member of the CDC Opioid Workgroup. She has authored/coauthored five books for patients and clinicians. Her work has been featured in outlets such as Scientific American, NPR Radio, BBC Radio, and Nature. In 2018 she spoke on the psychology of pain relief at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.