Mind, body and pain

For lots of therapists, the connection between mind and body is so clear that we forget many people just have no concept of how the two might be connected. So often in the web there are wild statements about pain that it’s tempting to think that no-one’s prepared to get it right or to [...]

Pain, disability and psychosocial factors

Something that can really get my goat is when people think that because someone has high disability, and they have pain, it must be the pain that ’causes’ the disability - therefore reduce the pain, and you will inevitably reduce the disability.
This can lead to over-treatment of pain with medication (to reduce the pain, often [...]

Centenarians also get back pain…

Pain in the Back and Neck Are With Us Until the End
A Nationwide Interview-Based Survey of Danish 100-Year-Olds
I’ll bet you thought that at some point in life we might not be at risk of back or neck pain - guess what, we’re all wrong. This fascinating study by Jan Hartvigsen and Kaare Christensen looks [...]

Managing low back pain: knowledge and attitudes of hospital managers

Now this is a really useful, although unsurprising, study of hospital line manager’s knowledge of the management of low back pain. Sad to say, Caitriona Cunningham, Catherine Doody, and Catherine Blake of UCD School of Physiotherapy and Performance Science, Dublin, Ireland, found that 54% (N=32) of the managers who responded to their survey believed [...]

Stabilisation exercises for low back pain: a systematic review

I was recently in a forum for dancers where I suggested that there were no specific exercises that were particularly helpful for low back pain – horrors! Someone said ‘You mean the doctor might as well have said to go home and pick your nose as do even Pilates’, to which I sighed…not exactly [...]