Useful resources: handouts on basic coping skills

Trawling through the interweb can be enlightening sometimes. What’s exciting is to see the range of resources government agencies provide. I’ve just spotted these from the Centre for Clinical Interventions (CCI) from the Department of Health, Australia.
This list of fun activities in pdf includes some social ones as well as solitary ones, [...]

Anatomy and physiology refresher - or patient information

If you have forgotten (or never really knew) all your muscle origins, insertions, innervations and actions - here is a fantastic animated site that can bring it all back in glorious colour and animations!!
Get Body Smart has interactive tutorials, animations, quizzes, and lots of fun for anyone who is interested in really know what each [...]

A nice lay summary of pain

I ran across this post today in my ongoing search through the net - Why do we have pain?. It’s a very brief article written by someone with fibromyalgia giving a pretty useful description of the difference between pain and injury or tissue damage. And a bunch of links to articles found [...]

Cognitive behaviour for pain worksheet - client information

It’s not always easy to find freely available client worksheets that reflect ‘real life’ situations, and are written for the age and reading level of the people we often see. For example, most of the people I work with are practical ‘hands-on’ people who don’t like reading or writing, and are either very visual [...]

A round-up of blogs to keep you busy

If you’re an occasional visitor to my blog, you may find plenty here already to keep you busy while I pop on over to Brisbane for the weekend to attend the PainLang forum to hear Harold Merskey and others talk about
“• an overview of the current state of play in research on pain language
• to [...]

Finding positive solutions

Sometimes you stumble across something that you just can’t put better than it already is… Today’s one of those days, and I’ve found a website that summarises a whole bunch of coping strategies very neatly indeed.
Click this link to go to arthritis.about.com for a great range of pages covering topics like 10 ways to improve [...]

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 [...]

Personal growth activities

One resource I can’t do without is new ideas for personal growth activities. I stumbled upon this one recently, and have found the activities a little different from some, and quite thought-provoking.
It’s always helpful to adapt something that is used with people who are ‘well’ rather than using something specifically designed for people with [...]

Cognitive behaviour management resources

One website I keep returning to is this Cognitive behavior management reference holds a wealth of resources that are mainly in the public domain (provided they are attributed appropriately).
There are three main areas covered on the site:
* Cognitive Rehabilitation: This has two components, cognitive restructuring and cognitive error correction. [...]

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 [...]