Why pain management for work is different

There are many people who have completed a pain management programme, know how to do things like breathing, working to quota (pacing), relaxation strategies, distraction and exercise - but when they are asked about returning to work say ‘I can do these things at home, but not at work’.
I have many books on pain management [...]

Hippocrates

Now I’m not going to post a lot about Hippocrates himself, but I want to start todays post by quoting something that he is supposed to have said: ‘There are, in fact, two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance’.
Hippocrates proposed that if a new treatment was to be tried, we [...]

Effects of disability - diathesis-stress

I’ve posted before on the effects of disability that make coping a challenge - today I want to cover a few more areas. My aim is not to suggest a ‘poor me’ attitude towards people with chronic pain, but instead to highlight how these demands might affect core beliefs. This is an important [...]

For the visual amongst us - CB Worksheet

I’m a very visual person, I love to see what I’m doing, and I use visual imagery a lot in my language and my processing. Many of our clients are also visual - or they’re kinaesthetic - and they need to see and manipulate rather than listen and talk.
At some point while working with [...]

We’re not trained monkeys!

One time I was carrying out some work for a large organisation that wanted to train a lot of people to do some assessment work. It annoyed me for some reason, and I’ve finally hit on the problem (OK, several years too late, but never mind!). The problem was that instead of teaching principles, [...]

Why CBT? How do patients feel about it?

There are many different therapies out there - why is CBT (or one of the newer variants) the Chosen One?
I gave a few reasons yesterday -
* that people are capable of change,
* can accept self responsibility for their actions,
* that what we think and believe about a situation can affect our emotions and responses, [...]

Some theory - and how we can put it into practice

Before we start on cognitive behavioural therapy, we need to know what we’re on about - for me in pain management, CBT assumes:

that people are capable of change,
can accept self responsibility for their actions,
that what we think and believe about a situation can affect our emotions and responses, and
that we can implement a whole [...]

Working with cognitive behavioural therapy - Introducing CBT to a client

For a therapy that has great empirical support and can be used by any and all members of the interdisciplinary team, you can’t really go far from cognitive behavioural therapy. Waaaay back in the olden days when I was originally trained as an occupational therapist, CBT was the province of psychologists only - and [...]

Return to work: Clinical judgements and evidence-based decisions

It’s not often that we find an article that draws on clinical knowledge rather than directly from experimental findings, but when we do, it can add something really helpful as in this article by Heidi Muenchberger, Elizabeth Kendall, Peter Grimbeek and Travis Gee.
Now I’m definitely a proponent of evidence-based management - but in very complex [...]

On the nature of rehabilitation

This is a very personal post today. I’m almost at the end of a 14 month rehabilitation programme to recover from postconcussion syndrome. 26 February 2007 I hit my head on the edge of the door of our 4WD when I was getting in. I had pushed myself up on the door [...]