Occupational therapy & the cognitive behavioural approach for pain management
I have always resisted being labelled. I am much more than my gender, my marital status, my diagnosis, my professional background. I also feel quite uncomfortable about being told what I may or may not do (maybe that’s where my kids get it from?!). I don’t like being told what is and isn’t ‘my role’ … Read more
Friday Funnies
Mapping my desk. Familiar to anyone? I’ll be off to see the Buskers this weekend – go here if you don’t know what I’m talking about. The very best of the world’s buskers are here, and it’s awesome!
Pulling it all together – biopsychosocial assessment
Over the past little while I’ve been writing about how a comprehensive pain assessment can be carried out. Today it’s time to pull that information together to develop a formulation, or set of possible explanations for why this person presents in this way at this time – at least for one or two aspects of … Read more
Pulling the biopsychosocial assessment together
Over the past couple of posts I’ve described one way to assess a person’s chronic pain presentation from a medical, psychosocial and functional perspective. I don’t think there is much difficulty in seeing how these three perspectives can help us develop a biopsychosocial explanation, or formulation, for why this person is presenting in this way … Read more
A comprehensive pain assessment continued
One of the hallmarks of chronic pain is the effect on functional performance. It’s for this reason alone that an assessment of function needs to be a major part of any comprehensive pain assessment. This, however, is probably where agreement begins – and ends. Function is all about doing, and in this kind of pain … Read more
A comprehensive pain assessment
What makes up a comprehensive pain assessment? I could begin and never end this particular topic, I know, so I’ll try to confine myself to some of the major themes as I see it. While this is my opinion, and readers should always remember this, there are some very good researchers and clinicians who hold … Read more
Working out who does what: Teamwork at its best
I work in a large team of clinicians. We have clinicians from occupational therapy, physiotherapy, nursing, social work, clinical psychology and specialist medics with anaesthetic, musculoskeletal and occupational backgrounds. Teamwork is absolutely vital to our work. When we start to work with an individual, we work in much smaller teams of two or three: someone … Read more
Brain training – it happens all the time
At the risk of seeming untrendy, the trend to rave on about neuroplasticity can be a bit overdone. Not, I add quickly, because it doesn’t happen, or it’s not important – in fact, quite the opposite – but because it happens all the time. And at the back of our minds, I think we’ve known … Read more
It’s really all about the brain
Neuroscience is such a geeky area to study. And I have to say I didn’t really study the brain all that well in my undergraduate training all those years ago – but oh, how the worm has turned! It’s so exciting to see how basic science directly influences treatments that we can use for people … Read more
