Why I care about science and evidence

I caught myself wondering in the last few days about why I am so keen to pursue science and evidence-based approaches to health care.  I’m definitely consistent about wanting to know why something works, and equally consistent about knowing that it works - at the same time I meet people every day who don’t believe [...]

Science and therapists

I’ll admit I’ve been warped a little by psychologists. No, I haven’t learned to blame my parents for how I’ve turned out (that’s why my mother wouldn’t let me study psychology when I left school!), but psychology as a field of science has definitely made me more thoughtful and critical of how I make [...]

Clinical reasoning - more than problem solving…

Once upon a time, I was a baby occupational therapist, newly graduated, and I dutifully followed what I had learned as ‘the occupational therapy problem solving process’.  This process was:

Identifying the problems (usually as identified by ‘the client’ who was often the person I ended up seeing, but just as easily could be the person [...]

Clear communication - an activity to encourage active listening

People who experience pain can have trouble saying what they want to happen - and difficulty hearing what other people really have to say. OK, I agree it’s a problem for us all - but

pain interferes with the capacity to attend to and process information, and
people with pain are often engaged in systems such [...]

Supervision

Supervision has both a good reputation and a not so good - for me it’s been a mixed blessing because I have rarely had effective supervision from an occupational therapist (with the exception of my current occupational therapy supervisor!), and in fact the majority of my clinical supervision has been from psychologists.
I’ve posted much more [...]

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, [...]

Ethics and therapy choices

I was having a discussion yesterday with a colleague who has recently started working in another area of health, away from pain management.  He was talking about the different philosophy that exists in this new area, and the change of practice that he was learning to deal with, and it made me stop to think [...]

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 [...]