Whiplash is one of those conditions that often strikes fear into the hearts of clinicians, mainly because chronic whiplash is very hard to treat. This not helped by the fact that there is scepticism regarding the condition itself due to its lack of objective findings. Whiplash associated disorders (WAD) are largely diagnosed based on mechanism of … [Read more...]
Findings on imaging for whiplash? It’s a miracle! What does it actually mean?
November 11, 2011 By 9 Comments
Someone else’s pain—Are you in or out?
October 25, 2011 By 2 Comments
One of the bits of the brain I find the toughest to understand is the insula. We hear about it when the “pain matrix” is discussed. The insula is part of what is currently understood as the medial pain system— involved in assigning meaning, emotion and affect to the pain experience[1]. Various neuroimaging studies have found activity in … [Read more...]
Good for the goose, good for the gander. Heidi Allen talks about BiM.
September 29, 2011 By 8 Comments
So, we have spent the last weeks introducing you to the BiM team at UniSA in Adelaide and Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. Well, I got my own back and grabbed Heidi's phone and asked her a few questions. Here she is: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2M_RxKa_g … [Read more...]
What happens when systematic reviews tell us different things?
September 27, 2011 By 6 Comments
Conventional wisdom tells us that when we want an answer to a clinical question, such as what is the evidence for treatment ‘X’, we should look to systematic reviews because they collate all the available evidence on that topic. Problematically though, sometimes systematic reviews on the same topic don’t all give us the same conclusions. This … [Read more...]
There is no such thing as a new idea continued
September 22, 2011 By 5 Comments
(continued from last post)…Socio-cognitive models have been used by health psychologist to increase our understanding of a variety of health behaviours. What about disability associated with low back pain? If we can think of disability as made up of specific behaviours then and if these behaviours are intentional it follows that people with … [Read more...]
There is no such thing as a new idea
September 20, 2011 By 5 Comments
For my first BIM post I wanted to blog about an article that I read some years ago that had probably the biggest impact on my thinking on low back pain and disability and 15 years later still informs the way that I think about pain and disability. Around the mid 1990s when I first started research in low back pain a UK-based health psychologist … [Read more...]
James McAuley talks back pain and research
September 16, 2011 By 5 Comments
James is Manager of the BiM research group at NeuRA. James is a veritable expert at this sort of thing - having been Manager of the Back Pain Research Group at Sydney University and the George Institute. His research interests are in back pain and clinical pain. James is possibly the most interesting manager in the world - former club … [Read more...]
More Q than A
August 16, 2011 By 4 Comments
Recently I was watching Q&A on the ABC. For those of you who’ve not seen it, Q&A, short for Questions and Answers, is a debate-style programme which brings together a panel of politicians and other prominents, and takes questions from the audience regarding topical issues. Every week I find myself intensely frustrated by the … [Read more...]
Introducing Flavia Di Pietro. Imaging the Brain
August 11, 2011 By 4 Comments
Flavia Di Pietro Flavia Di Pietro is a PhD student in the Body and Mind Research Group, Sydney. She is investigating the development of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) after wrist fracture. Specifically, Flavia’s PhD involves brain scanning people who are in a higher than usual amount of pain in the first 3 weeks after the fracture, and … [Read more...]
The illusion of external agency – part 2
August 9, 2011 By 4 Comments
Last post I introduced the idea that illusions of external agency could arise if we unknowingly change ‘truly mediocre’ outcomes into ‘falsely great’ outcomes and then confuse them as actually being ‘truly great’. Then the fact that we have experienced a ‘truly great’ outcome, that ‘defies the odds’ may result in us attributing … [Read more...]
The illusion of external agency – part 1
August 4, 2011 By 4 Comments
So I was reading through some papers and found an oldie but a goody by Gilbert et al[1] that I’d like to share. This paper aimed to experimentally test what the authors call ‘The illusion of external agency’, or in simple terms, the idea that a greater being looks out for your well-being. Now before this turns into a punch-throwing, … [Read more...]
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