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, [...]

A personal bias

Now some readers have been wondering what my background is…Sometimes I feel like being rather provocative and asking why - while other times, like now, I feel like ‘fessing up.
Here is a clue: in pain management, to me the most important thing is to see people doing things differently.
That’s right, although I’m a strong believer [...]

Postgraduate distance-taught papers in pain and pain management

If you haven’t started planning 2008 postgraduate study yet - there are a couple of ‘down-under’ papers that you can choose from.
University of Otago, Christchurch has the Postgraduate Diploma in Musculoskeletal Medicine (for medical practitioners), which includes a number of papers that can be credited to Masters of Health Sciences. These papers cover a [...]

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 [...]

Chronic Pain’s Favourite Tools

Teamwork and working with thoughts and beliefs.
Some therapists believe cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is ‘only’ for psychologists. Well, I’m not one of them. Frankly, if you are hoping to change ‘what people do’, you are using CBT…whether you’re doing it well or not - that’s another thing! (uhh.. that proviso holds for psychologists [...]