Research into the role of the brain in chronic pain
At first I felt a bit weird with them telling me I had arthritis and that. I thought it was a bit of a joke. Then they showed me the x-rays and that and MRI, cat scan, whatever it was, it was a bit depressing and a bit shocking being young and finding out you’ve got arthritis. It wasn’t too good. (26 year old Aboriginal man with … [Read more...]
Many of you may be aware of the process for making left/right judgments of hands. For those who aren’t, I’ll try to sum it up in brief. When trying to identify whether a picture of a hand is a left hand or a right, it’s thought that we access the cortical maps of our hands. The process is as follows; we pick a hand that we subconsciously … [Read more...]
“Every time it hurts I think it is getting worse and I am killing, I am breaking down, I am killing myself so I will do anything I can to stop it from hurting.” (male, aged 42 years) Low back pain can be a scary experience. When pain is perceived as being harmful or dangerous to the individual, it becomes something feared and avoided.[1] But … [Read more...]
This commentary was first published in the Journal of Pain. We thought it was worthwhile to publish it again here:Almost everyone suffers acute pain. Why do most recover, but an unfortunate few descend a downward spiral of social, personal and economic disadvantage? One hypothesis that has been interrogated for two decades is the fear … [Read more...]
Clinical research into the management of low back pain has shown that the current available treatments offer, at best, only moderate effects. Our Spinal Research Group at the University of Sydney has been one of the pioneers in the field and most of these discouraging results have been produced by high quality randomized controlled trials and … [Read more...]
Our research laboratory at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in the United States has tested a distinguished form of physical therapy for persons with chronic walking difficulty from multiple sclerosis. The therapy is called Constraint-Induced Movement therapy, or CI therapy for short. The treatment was developed from years of basic … [Read more...]
Here, Gian Domenico Alessandro Magnifico Fantistico Iannetti and Flavia Eleganta Bellisima Mancini talk us through pain at your fingertips. They did a very groovy experiment that, for the first time, uncovered the pattern of receptive fields for nociception at the finger tips. Their results are remarkable insofar as they show that what we have long … [Read more...]
This story of a 28 year old man with disabling low back pain illustrates the CB-CFT intervention trialled in the RCT in Bergen, Norway. ‘Eight years ago I had a lifting injury at work. It was terrible pain, I was worried so I went to the doctor who ordered a scan. The doctor said I had a back of a 70 year old. He said I couldn’t surf again and … [Read more...]
It was in 2005 that I came up with the idea of a “gaze direction recognition" (GDR) task as a possible treatment for chronic neck pain. At that time some of the rehabilitation patients visiting my rehabilitation department had suffered from neck pain for a long time because of cervical strain or previous cervical spine surgery. In those days, … [Read more...]
The common elements making an event stressful to anybody are novelty, unpredictability, threat to the ego, and loss of sense of control. People suffering from chronic pain know how stressful spontaneous pain can be. The reciprocal influence of stress over the neural activity contributing to chronic pain has recently received growing interest from … [Read more...]
I was riding my bike on my normal route to work. Then it happened, like a blink. A jeep that was not supposed to be there was there, coming at me. No time to change course or apply brakes, just brace for impact.I was headed west bound on a two lane road. Entering a light controlled intersection on a green light. A Jeep Cherokee in the … [Read more...]
Have you ever had your scalp massaged with an orgasmatron? And then tried to re-instate the pleasure yourself but it just did not feel the same? It appears that a short time delay needs to be present between the movement of the hand and the experienced tactile sensation, in order for us to assign an external cause to the felt sensation. As a … [Read more...]
I read a disturbing review recently, about the state of the art treatment for persistent pain as being topical amitriptyline or removal of the offending tissue. If we were discussing low back pain most would agree these would be ridiculous treatment options. Imagine my crinkled nose of disdain to find this commentary in July 2012 regarding the … [Read more...]
Subacromial impingement syndrome is a common cause of shoulder pain that has multiple causes (subacromial bursitis to rotator cuff tendinopathy and full-thickness rotator cuff tears). Unfortunately, for almost half of people afflicted with this syndrome, medical treatment is not successful and they will continue to have shoulder pain 2 years … [Read more...]
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