Some of you have no doubt heard the phrase ‘pain doesn’t exist until you feel it’. This phrase refers to the dependence that pain has on being conscious. One might suggest that we would be better placed to solve the pain problem if we first solved the consciousness problem. What is the consciousness problem? Well, it is what many … [Read more...]
Pain is sexist. Sex Hormones and Anxiety Modulate Brain Responses to Painful Stimuli
December 2, 2011 By 4 Comments
Serge Marchand, Ph.D. and Isabelle Gaumond, Ph.D. Women and men are different in many ways; some of these differences are obvious and some not so intuitive. For example, pain is sexist. The burning question is who between men and woman is more tolerant to pain? For most people, it seems clear that women are more tolerant or at least they … [Read more...]
In response to ‘Is chronic pain a disease in its own right?’
November 25, 2011 By 3 Comments
Professor Michael Cousins took some time to read and comment on 'Is chronic pain a disease in its own right'. It was so good that we didn't want it to get lost at the end of the comments section so we have made it a post in its own right. Here he is: Recognition of chronic pain as a chronic disease is not only a key element of the National … [Read more...]
Is chronic pain a disease in its own right?
November 18, 2011 By 53 Comments
I recently received an email from Vanessa Milne who is doing Post Graduate Studies in Pain Science at University of Sydney with the who’s who of Australian pain stuff - Nicholas, Cousins, Siddall, Keast.... an impressive line up that. Anyway, Professor Michael Cousins is leading the way in an impressive and ambitious attempt to put pain on … [Read more...]
Could manual therapy be the narcotic of pessimists?
November 15, 2011 By 4 Comments
I am an optimist but I am thinking about jumping the fence - joining the dark side of pessimism and excessive dread. Maybe I am being a bit hasty? I know we all think that there is little benefit in pessimism and that we would rather have an optimistic patient come in the door than a pessimistic one. There is an entire industry based on pop-psych … [Read more...]
Findings on imaging for whiplash? It’s a miracle! What does it actually mean?
November 11, 2011 By 9 Comments
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...]
Is it time the memory worked again?
November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I was reading Valery Legrain’s blog and it caused me to reflect on what sort of daily use I give my working memory. Have I needed to mentally rehearse a phone number while dialling it? No, my phone dials whoever I ask it to. Have I bothered to calculate the amount of change I’m going to get at the checkout because the young assistant looks like … [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...]
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