Fads, fiction and fact

In pain management over the past 15 or so years I have seen a number of treatments come and go - and I guess now I’m a wee bit hesitant when a NEW! Improved! treatment is put forward. Not that I’m not keen to innovate, or get excited over progress - I just feel [...]

A free resource!

Some years ago I found Amedeo.com, a free contents service that delivers right to your inbox - and more!
If you find it really hard to keep up with the new information because it’s just so hard to find it, this service is a great way to make sure you get regular contents pages from some [...]

Biofeedback or - things that go ‘beep’!

Biofeedback is an approach to revealing the inner states of human functioning so that people can develop control. In pain management it can take many different forms from surface electro-myography (sEMG), skin conductance (SC), blood volume pulsimetry (BVP), respiration rate, and heart rate variability. It can even be as simple as readings on two scales [...]

If this ever happened here for Christmas, I’d be shocked!

Have fun with this!
Search for mine ‘Bronnie’ from ‘New Zealand’!!
Have fun!

Merry Christmas!

And don’t we deserve it!
Kiwi Christmas is always something special - long hot early summer days, cold ham and chicken, salads and minted new potatoes!
I’ll be taking a brief break from posting just for a couple of days.  I hope you’ll keep coming back - and if you can’t make it because you’re away - [...]

One size does not fit all - people with pain are not clones

On a similar theme from my post ‘Pain management can’t be cloned’, I want to post about the need to tailor therapy to suit the person.  Pain management does not follow a recipe - principles yes, protocols … not quite so sure.
What do I mean by this?  Well let’s take two people with back pain [...]

Pain management can’t be cloned

I’ve had occasion over the past few weeks to think about service delivery and teamwork and how to provide really good pain management programmes in a group context.
A problem with any interdisciplinary team is that the members of the team may change as staff leave, or are unwell, or even have annual leave(yes! we like [...]

Positive psychology - Polyanna or Promising?

I was hoping to post on positive psychology and chronic pain, but have failed to find any specific references using these two headings - I then had a brain-wave and without waiting for someone reading this to locate something for me… I remembered the body of research in contextual cognitive behavioural therapy - mainly by [...]

It’s not enough just to feel - it’s about ‘what do you feel?’

 
Pain. 2007 Dec 1

Tactile discrimination, but not tactile stimulation alone, reduces chronic limb pain.
Moseley GL, Zalucki NM, Wiech K

This interesting study by the prolific Lorimer Moseley suggests that it’s not good enough for people with complex regional pain syndrome to just be exposed to tactile stimuli, but they need to do something with that [...]

Task Persistence - the least used coping skill

Apart from pacing, there can be few coping strategies that people dislike more than task persistence.
What is task persistence and why do people dislike it?
Task persistence is about maintaining activity despite fluctuations of pain intensity - allowing pain to increase without stopping. Isn’t that pacing, you say? Well, perhaps part of pacing … [...]