Work is the context

For many years I’ve worked in pain management and tried to help people return to work as the completion of their rehabilitation. Why? Well, apart from it being a great thing from an insurer or funder’s point of view, it’s actually what people want.
Having been through my own return to work rehabilitation after my [...]

Colour therapy…

With only a small proportion of the people experiencing acute low back pain becoming chronically disabled by their pain, a holy grail of sorts has been to quickly and effectively identify those who need additional help and those who don’t.
The ‘Psychosocial Yellow Flags’ initially developed in New Zealand by Kendall, Linton & Main (1999) provides [...]

April already!

It’s April and time for a change of season, sadly.  For us in the southern hemisphere it means we’re moving swiftly into autumn, with the leaves outside my house becoming yellow and fluttering to the ground, and the hint of chill in the air at night and early morning.  After a weekend away, it’s a [...]

Function

There are some very weird and crazy measures out there in pain assessment land… some of them take a little stretch of the imagination to work out how they were selected and what they’re meant to mean in the real world.
Functional measures are especially challenging - given that they are about what a person will [...]

Sleep, glorious sleep - ii

In the previous post, I described some of the first areas to consider in assessing sleep problems in pain management, and discussed some simple strategies to consider. This post will complete the assessment and management approaches, and some resources you can use.
Once you have assessed sleep onset, sleep duration and quality should be assessed. [...]

Sleep, glorious sleep

If you’ve had a new baby in your house, or been jet-lagged, worked shiftwork, or been worrying about a new job, you’ve probably had some time when your sleep pattern has really got out of sync. The feeling of not having had enough sleep is well-known to throw some of us right into depression, [...]

One size does not fit all - people with pain are not clones

On a similar theme from my post ‘Pain management can’t be cloned’, I want to post about the need to tailor therapy to suit the person.  Pain management does not follow a recipe - principles yes, protocols … not quite so sure.
What do I mean by this?  Well let’s take two people with back pain [...]

Chronic Pain Assessment and Measurement

Ask anyone who has worked in chronic pain management for a while about assessment tools or measurement and you’ll see the eyes roll - how many assessment questionnaires do we need???
Firstly I want to clarify what I mean by assessment, and the difference between that and measurement.
Measurement is all about quantifying something - how much, [...]

Is chronic pain a diagnosis?

Diagnoses provide clinicians and researchers with a way to classify and communicate sets of signs and symptoms. Often these clusters of symptoms are presumed to have some underlying similarity – either similar causal mechanisms, or response to similar treatments.
However, they reduce the emphasis on individual differences between patients, and can cause clinicians [...]