Brainblogger and GNIF

You know, there are so many places on the net that have excellent information - the world really is a small place now.
I ran across Brainblogger today, where there are many different people writing about “topics from multidimensional biopsychosocial perspectives. It reviews the latest news and stories related to neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology. It serves [...]

Diaries

For the longest time I wasn’t in favour of pain diaries, but I’m starting to revise my thinking.  No real ‘evidence’ per se to support this, more of a sense that it can be a useful tool for self regulation.
What are they?
Pain diaries can be used in a variety of ways, but major similarities are:

days [...]

Best of January’s Pain Blogs

Head on over to How to Cope with Pain for this month’s ‘Best of’ blog posts. And while you’re there take a look around at the range of resources on offer - plenty for everyone!
How to Cope with Pain is now offering a monthly Pain-Blog Carnival during the last week of every month, to [...]

Happy Happy, Joy Joy - there is a science to this!

For yet another thoughtful post on the science of positive psychology, you can’t go far wrong with taking a look at Jeremy’s PsyBlog for great summaries on this area of research.
I’m keen to find out more about positive psychology for use with people who experience persistent pain - it makes sense to me that [...]

Responding to real but unhelpful beliefs

One of my beefs about cognitive therapy has to be the concept of ‘maladaptive’ or ‘erroneous’ beliefs. For many people experiencing pain, their beliefs are based on experience since developing persistent pain - so we could readily be called out if we suggest that their belief that ‘I always get a flare-up when I [...]

Mulling over balance in the biopsychosocial…

For some years I’ve taught a postgraduate course in pain and pain management - my responsibility is to teach the psychosocial components, while I coordinate the content of both papers.  Recently I had a discussion with a colleague who suggested that the psychosocial component was over-represented, while the biophysical was under-represented.
At the time I didn’t [...]

Online info for Aussies - can we play too?

I totally agree with this post at Medgadget - most of the information on the internet is focused on North America. Thankfully there are a few of us based in the Southern Hemisphere, and it looks like there will be more than one resource for us! This wee article from University of New [...]

Real-time neuroimagery - biofeedback on steroids

Biofeedback has been a wonderful tool for learning control of body functions that we usually can’t directly monitor.
Now here’s something that takes the concept of biofeedback just a wee bit further - not that we’ll get to use it in day-to-day pain management for a wee while!!
Psychology of Pain reports on the use of neuroimaging [...]

Cognitive behaviour management resources

One website I keep returning to is this Cognitive behavior management reference holds a wealth of resources that are mainly in the public domain (provided they are attributed appropriately).
There are three main areas covered on the site:
* Cognitive Rehabilitation: This has two components, cognitive restructuring and cognitive error correction. [...]

Mind your language

Often I hear people with ongoing pain talk about their ‘injury’.  Ouch!  This makes me feel worried - when pain persists, it’s no longer an ‘injury’ it’s pain! Pain itself is enough!!
The power of the language we use when we talk to people with pain is incredible, and often we forget that the words we [...]