Bigger Than Pain
A complete self-management and recovery system for people living with chronic pain — built from 16 years of clinical practice, and now available to anyone.
Most people dealing with persistent pain have seen plenty of clinicians.
They've done the exercises. Had the scans. Tried the treatments.
And they still don't have a coherent picture of what's actually happening — or a system they can follow between appointments that genuinely supports them.
That's not a failure of effort. It's a gap in how pain care is currently delivered.
After 16 years working with people living with complex, persistent pain — and having lived with it myself — I built something to close that gap.
What Bigger Than Pain Is
Bigger Than Pain is a digital wellness platform I designed and built from the ground up.
It isn't a course. It isn't an app full of generic exercises. It isn't a meditation tool.
It's a structured, state-aware recovery system — built around the same clinical framework I use every day, and designed to support people between appointments, or independently, when access to high-quality care isn't available.
The platform tracks how you're actually doing — your pain patterns, sleep, energy, movement tolerance, mood — and uses that to personalise what it shows you, when it shows it, and how much to ask of you on any given day.
Wayfinder
A daily check-in and adaptive guidance layer that helps you decide what to do, when to do it, and how to handle flare-ups without panic or guesswork.
The Vault
A growing library of evidence-based pain education, translated from the clinical literature into language that's actually usable in daily life.
Biggie
A clinically informed AI companion that understands your history, your patterns, and your current state, and supports you between sessions.
Move
A structured movement library, selected and sequenced by a clinician, not an algorithm.
Everything connects. Everything adapts. Nothing is generic.
The framework underpinning all of it — built across eight pain mechanism clusters and seven causal interaction loops — represents the codified knowledge of thousands of clinical hours. It's the same framework I apply when someone sits in front of me in Monaghan or Dublin. The platform makes it available at scale.
In plain terms: the platform recognises the patterns that keep pain stuck — the same way I would across the table — and responds to yours specifically.
The Clinical Foundation
Bigger Than Pain is a wellness platform. But the depth behind it is not typical of the category.
The principle I work from — in clinic and in building this platform — is simple: if I found a better, faster, or safer way to support someone through persistent pain, I would change what I do immediately. There's no attachment to methodology for its own sake. The only question is what genuinely helps — and whether it survives honest scrutiny.
That standard has been applied to an unusually wide field. Across pain neuroscience, movement science, nervous system regulation, sleep, metabolic health, and the psychology of recovery, I've gone deep into the published research — and trained in emerging approaches most clinicians never evaluate, precisely so they could be tested against that standard. That breadth forced a kind of systems thinking a more linear clinical education rarely produces.
What's inside Bigger Than Pain is what survived that lens. Not a collection of techniques. A coherent system.
The framework is grounded in 150+ published studies. I hold a BSc in Sports Rehabilitation, trained and practised internationally, and have taught clinicians methods including P-DTR and Anatomy in Motion. I've spent 16 years working alongside people who, in many cases, had already seen multiple specialists without resolution.
More than 9 in 10 would actively recommend this care.
508 clients rated their experience over eight years — and those are only the people who responded. (Net Promoter Score: 92.5 — a level few services in any industry reach.) That number reflects a methodology, not a personality. And it's the foundation the platform is built on.
Two Ways to Access the System
Through the clinic.
If you want to work directly with me — one-to-one, in person in Monaghan or Dublin, or via telehealth — that's where I apply the framework at its highest level. A thorough assessment. A personalised plan. Direct clinical reasoning applied to your specific history, movement patterns, and full pain picture.
Clients who use the Bigger Than Pain platform alongside their sessions get significantly more from both. They arrive to appointments already tracking. Already educated. Already working within the framework. That means we can go deeper, faster.
Through the platform.
If you can't access the clinic — whether that's geography, cost, availability, or simply wanting to start somewhere — Bigger Than Pain gives you the same clinical thinking in a format you can follow independently.
It isn't a replacement for everything a skilled clinician can offer. But for many people, it's more than they've ever had access to.
What People Say
“After years of seeing different physios and specialists, on my first visit with David it was the first time I was actually seen.”
“I had been seeing another physio for months for shoulder and neck pain which kept getting worse instead of better. David took a really comprehensive approach and got to the root of numerous issues affecting my functionality and confidence. His appointments are always so informative, interesting, and just impressive.”
After 6 years of pain, I was pain-free after 3 visits.
Rita B.
6 years of hip pain — pain-free after 3 visits
For the first time, I felt like the whole picture finally made sense.
Lorraine C.
BTP platform user
This gave me confidence in my body again instead of feeling like I just had to live with it.
Paul F.
BTP platform user
Why This Exists
I started living with chronic pain in my early teens. It stayed with me into my mid-twenties.
Even with a developing clinical background, it still took me 12–13 years to fully understand and work through what I was experiencing.
That shaped everything.
Not as a story to tell — but as a design constraint. A refusal to accept that people should have to piece this together alone, with fragmented advice, conflicting opinions, and no coherent structure to follow.
Bigger Than Pain is what I wish had existed when I needed it most.
— David Mc Gettigan
BSc. Sports Rehabilitation | Pain and Movement Specialist | Founder, Bigger Than Pain