Working with a kinesiophobic person

One of the biggest challenges when working with someone who is fearful of pain and avoids movement is that although it’s very much like any sort of phobia, it differs on one essential point: people who are spider phobic, socially phobic, fearful of flying or heights or whatever are usually aware at some level that [...]

Reduction of pain-related fear in complex regional pain syndrome

As promised, at last a post on graded exposure for pain-related anxiety and avoidance, as applied to complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS. This paper was published in 2005, and as far as I know, there have not been any replications carried out, so it must be seen as an initial experimental approach that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Back from holiday - aaah!refreshed!

Bo on a lean…
The walls and floor in this room at Wanaka’s Puzzling World are set to confuse my poor brain…
Holidays provide time for thinking for me - lots of opportunity to consider my options and wonder. Once again, activities that aren’t often appreciated in our output-driven society.
I reflected often on the number of [...]

Positive psychology - Polyanna or Promising?

I was hoping to post on positive psychology and chronic pain, but have failed to find any specific references using these two headings - I then had a brain-wave and without waiting for someone reading this to locate something for me… I remembered the body of research in contextual cognitive behavioural therapy - mainly by [...]

It’s not enough just to feel - it’s about ‘what do you feel?’

 
Pain. 2007 Dec 1

Tactile discrimination, but not tactile stimulation alone, reduces chronic limb pain.
Moseley GL, Zalucki NM, Wiech K

This interesting study by the prolific Lorimer Moseley suggests that it’s not good enough for people with complex regional pain syndrome to just be exposed to tactile stimuli, but they need to do something with that [...]