I’m Amy Waterman, and I founded Believe Pain because the healthcare system here in Aotearoa – and around the world – is failing people in pain. I know this not only from decades of personal study, but from decades of living it.
I have been seen by clinicians across multiple countries in public and private settings, across almost every specialty relevant to chronic pain. I have navigated systems that were never designed with people like me in mind. I have learned through persistence, trial and error, and hard-won knowledge how to advocate for myself when no one else would. Now I want to teach you.
You’re not imagining it
Maybe you have walked into a consulting room and been ignored by a clinician who sees only the information on his screen. Maybe you have tried to explain your symptoms only for your doctor to resume her monologue as if you’d never spoken. Maybe you have known something was wrong – really wrong – and been dismissed at every turn.
I know. Me too.
Few clinicians understand pain from the inside. Those who do often have some personal connection: a daughter with an autoimmune condition, a parent with arthritis, their own experience of a body that won’t cooperate. The rest are working from a model of pain that the last thirty years of pain science has largely left behind.
I was fortunate enough to be treated at one of the first pain clinics in the United States dedicated to fibromyalgia. Dr Ginevra Liptan founded the Frida Center for Fibromyalgia because she had developed fibromyalgia herself as a medical student; even her professors had not taken it seriously.
Being treated by someone who believes your pain and doesn’t need you to defend yourself, someone who’s alongside you, determined to get to the bottom of what makes you feel better… that experience changed what I understood was possible. It gave me a standard. And it made clear how far most of the system falls short of it.
From self-advocacy to advocacy
Learning to navigate the medical system across different countries, advocate for myself, and become a detective of my own health was challenging. None of it came with a guide. I pieced together what I could from books, research, and Facebook communities. Pain is isolating. You can feel like the only one on your side.
What I came to understand is that my experience was typical. It is simply how pain patients are treated. We are seen as drug-seeking, malingering, emotional. And we are seen that way because that is how clinicians are trained to see us. Stereotypes and bias are built into medical training and reproduced by funding models and system incentives. Pain patients are a burden on the system; we don’t get better. So the system responds by minimising us.
I knew that. I still hadn’t expected it so recently when, a few months ago, a musculoskeletal specialist spent an hour telling me my lived experience of my body was not to be trusted.
That’s the moment I knew I needed to step up from advocating for myself to building something larger.
Why Aotearoa New Zealand
Aotearoa New Zealand has its own particular pain story. Our healthcare system, our ACC framework, and our cultural norms around stoicism and what it means to be a good patient all shape how pain is experienced and how it is treated. This site focuses on our national context, while drawing on international research where it illuminates something true about ours.
I am currently undertaking postgraduate research in counselling at the University of Canterbury and hope to focus on pain bias and the treatment of patients with unexplained or persistent pain within healthcare systems. My aim is to bring academic rigour to what is, for many people, an invisible injustice.
Believe Pain sits at the intersection of that research and this lived knowledge, built in service of people who deserve better from the system meant to care for them.
I am on your side
If your pain has been dismissed, minimised, or met with scepticism, you are in the right place.
I’m not promising you that your pain will go away. I’m promising you that your voice will be heard.
Believe Pain is a site that takes seriously what the evidence shows and what patients have always known: that pain is real, that dismissal causes harm, and that things can be different.
Let’s make that case — together.