Empathy, distress and mindfulness
One of the main thrusts of the paper by Hadjistavropoulos, Craig, Duck, Cano, Goubert, Jackson, et al., is that pain communication can serve several functions – it can be an action where a message is sent or received; it can be an interaction where the message is sent, received and interpreted; or it can be … Read more
Seeing is believing?
I am slowly wending my way through a long, complex and incredibly important article by a group of researchers and clinicians writing about the social element of pain. The basic premise of this paper is that while pain is a private experience, we are social creatures. As social creatures, we communicate about things that are … Read more
Which comes first: Doing or knowing?
Received wisdom in cognitive behavioural therapy says that to change behaviour, a person must first change his or her thinking. This has created a tension between those clinicians who emphasise the cognitive aspects of pain management – and those who focus on helping people with pain do more. Should we educate and target cognitions, particularly … Read more
Around and around and around we go – or…back to the beginning again
In the early days of non-medical chronic pain management, operant models of behavioural learning were used by Prof W Fordyce. At the time, this was a revolutionary approach to helping people with chronic pain reduce their disability, distress and depression by altering the reinforcement schedules operating on pain behaviour. It was such an innovation because … Read more
