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 [...]

Context and sociocultural factors

I posted yesterday about how little social and cultural factors seem to be included in assessing and managing pain, and I had hoped to find some papers to discuss today. Events conspired and I have failed in that endeavour, so this post is, unusually for me, almost entirely my opinion.
So, sticking my neck out, [...]

It’s not rocket science - it’s respecting the individual

Using cognitive behavioral therapies in pain management isn’t really rocket science, it’s simply being aware of the principles of learning from both a cognitive (thinking) point of view and a behavioural point of view. It is, however, complex - by that I mean, there are many threads to systematically follow and actively manage.
There does [...]

Pain Blog Carnival!

Every month like clockwork ‘How to cope with Pain’ Blog has a carnival roundup of the best in pain management posts in the internet. If you haven’t visited before, head on over there today - loads of things to read, and links to places I’ll bet you haven’t been before.

Sleep - pain - sleep - pain - sleep

Today a client and I were discussing sleep. She said to me
‘Why is it that I can’t get off to sleep because I’m so sore, then I have a bad pain day, I’m really tired,
and I still can’t go off to sleep, so the next day I have a worse pain day.’
We’ve known anecdotally [...]

If you find it hard to slow down…

Self regulation is something we learn to do to achieve goals - it’s all about establishing what the goal is, find out how close we are to the goal, the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and what we need to do to get there. This is a reasonably [...]

Smoking and pain

Something I’ve noticed many times is the number of people experiencing chronic pain who also smoke. It used to be thought that people who smoke perhaps had poorer health behaviours which lead them to be less fit, less careful about eating well, and perhaps to having poorer responses to stressors generally. And I’ve [...]

Pain Behaviour Activity

Having looked all over the place for some suitable activities for people to become aware of their own pain behaviour and then learn to change it, I decided to put together one of my own. Now, unlike the posts I’ve made recently, I have no research to determine its effectiveness, but I hope you’ll [...]

A quiz for you!

Sometimes what we need is a bit of a fun challenge - so here is yours for today…
Try and answer these questions - answers tomorrow!
1. Which type of pain process occurs when the nociceptive impulse reaches the cerebral cortex?

Modulation.

Perception.

Transmission.

Transduction.

2. Chronic pain may result when the nervous system is unable to return to a state of:

Nociception.

Depolarization.

Modulation.

Homeostasis.

3. [...]

Making an exception - one way to soften a rule

I’ve mentioned before that one of the main problems with helping people to develop new ways of managing their pain is internal rules - things that we all learned as kids probably! Things like ‘if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well’, ‘never leave a job unfinished’..
These are great general rules, but [...]