A fortnight of no fixed abode…
One of my favourite things is to be able to take my watch off, turn my phone off, be away from town – and go bush. For the next fortnight I’ll be somewhere in the lower half of the South Island, New Zealand. Manly Jack and I are taking off in the 4WD to meander … Read more
Friday Funny!
It’s that day again! have a great weekend…even after you’ve read this!
Vocational Rehabilitation – working well!
I just ran across this paper written by Sainsbury Centre and the College of Occupational Therapists in the UK, about vocational rehabilitation in mental health. Great free paper, with some ideas that are really helpful and, yes, practical. Cited in this paper is a reference by Waddell, Burton & Kendall (2008) reviewing vocational rehabilitation. Waddell, … Read more
‘So how do you feel?’ – when should you ask about pain?
If you have ever had to fill out a client charge-out sheet you will know just what a pain it can be to have to record what you’re doing every 10 minutes or so…and if you’ve EVER tried to get a patient to fill out a daily activity diary, daily pain diary – or any … Read more
Intermittent pain
I think intermittent pain must be one of the more challenging types of pain to have – one minute everything is going fine, then WHAMMO! out of the blue there is a bolt of electricity to hit the body. The sort of pain I’m talking about here is primarily neuropathic pain, and I’m working with … Read more
What’s getting in the way of good pain management in rheumatoid arthritis?
It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that if there is a good understanding of the mechanism of a painful disease, some effective ways to treat it, and it’s an ‘acceptable’ disease to have (unlike some mental health disorders) – then people with the disease should really have great pain relief…or is it? This study by Fitzcharles, … Read more
Quality assessment of diagnostic accuracy
I was taking a moment or two to looked through some of my RSS feeds, and came across this post on the quality of diagnostic accuracy. QUADAS stands for: Q – Quality A – Assessment of D – Diagnostic A – Accuracy S – Studies It’s especially developed for people who use physical assessment, and … Read more
PHODA findings – chronic low back pain and people with high and low kinesiophobia
I’ve written quite a few times about the PHODA – photographs of activities of daily living – and I’m in the process of developing a New Zealand contextual version of it for use in the Pain Management Centre in which I work. Today I’m briefly discussing another paper in press about the use of a … Read more
Pain Catastrophizing and Pain-Related Fear in Osteoarthritis Patients: Relationships to Pain and Disability
There was a time when unless tissue damage could be seen on X-ray or scan, pain was thought to be either imaginery or ‘psychogenic’. As time has gone on, it’s more common than not to read that people have chronic pain (such as neuropathic pain) that is present without evidence on some sort of imaging, … Read more
