Many of us here at BiM went to the Festival de NOI a couple of weeks ago. It was fab. However, we know that most of you couldn’t make it …

Last Sunday, April 29th, saw the first ever UniSA Ride for Pain. The day can only be described as a rip-roaring success. The stats were impressive – over 550 riders, 400 of whom took on the whole 100km and most of those conquering the mighty Corkscrew Challenge – but it was the terrific stories that capture the essence of what really was a terrific day. I will recount one here…

There is an old and well known adage that stress causes negative health outcomes including the formation of gastric ulcers, heart disease, and cancer. How this takes place in any specific individual is difficult to sort out. However, sometimes when complex things are too complex it’s nice to look for some of the possible mechanisms.

There is some evidence that classical conditioned responses play a role in chronic pain. Can you unlearn a classically conditioned response? How do you inhibit a memory?

It has been about a month since I wrote a post reflecting on this pain I have in my shoulder. I must say I was overwhelmed by the many offers …

Not too long ago The New York Times ran an article proposing a positive side of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It featured the US Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program, an ambitious application of positive psychology initiated by BG (Ret) Cornam with guidance from Dr. Martin Seligman.

Many patients with CTS also have coexisting neck and/or arm pain. It remains unclear whether identified altered pain thresholds are truly caused by CTS, or are just a result of the coexisting neck or arm disorders. To address this issue, we investigated whether the presence of abnormal extraterritorial pain thresholds can be substantiated….

I think my 7 year old son knew that if he used this phrase enough it would eventually sneak into a blog post. Well congratulations Lord Adorable SqueakyPants, it has! It has made it in because we are pretty excited that a project we have been working on for some time is almost done – it is at the printing press as we speak.

Our research at The University of Nottingham unexpectedly stumbled into the media spotlight: “Mind tricks may help arthritic pain; Illusions can halve the pain of osteoarthritis” the headlines read. They were referring to our MIRAGE multisensory illusions box, which can create a powerful illusion that the hand or fingers are being stretched or shrunk…

n the previous blog post we discussed a model for a way in which a neutral stimulus when repeatedly paired with a biologically significant stimulus might come to elicit a conditioned response that is similar to the response to the biologically significant stimulus. Well here is a bit more on that very theme…

In the realm of chronic pain, “problem learning” discussion usually revolves around the processes of sensitisation (i.e. central) and operant conditioning (i.e. development of habitual pain behaviours through reinforcement processes). Ironically, perhaps the most famous form of learning has received the least attention by researchers in chronic pain. I am of course talking about…