Research into the role of the brain in chronic pain
All those fabulous people who did Ride for Pain at your place! have completed their rides and those who could sent their photos and movies in. Click on the gallery pics and they get bigger. In no particular order here are.... The Norse Vikings - Norway httpv://youtu.be/w0656e_4FRAMore pics here and for you keenies click on the … [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...]
Two foods I love eating regularly (and that’s probably not a good thing for the latter) are tuna and ice cream. Thankfully, I have a firm grasp of the concept that some things just weren’t made for mixing.You might think this is a funny way to start a blog post on CRPS… but I promise you the Adelaide heat hasn’t fried my brain. I … [Read more...]
Advertisers and marketers make a living out of grabbing your attention. They are not above using sudden loud noises (a salient physical stimulus or bottom-up attention grab). Nor do they shy away from top-down effects such as priming (defined as subtle suggestions made to the ‘subconscious’ brain to influence behaviour). But wait. Don’t … [Read more...]
While pain may be a universal experience, one experience that can often plague and frustrate everyone is that time when something works one moment but then all of a sudden doesn’t work the next. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing this you’ll find that it applies to many things in life whether it be the temperamental office … [Read more...]
One of the best workshops I attended at the IASP congress in Milano was on placebo analgesia, run by three very classy speakers: Luana Colloca, Ulrike Bingel, and Regine Klinger.I learnt lots about the neurobiological mechanisms of placebo and nocebo, and came away with lots to ponder. This is what I learnt:The rostral anterior cingulate … [Read more...]
“Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease."- William Osler On the Educational Value of the Medical Society, In Aequanimitas, p.331 As we know there have been any number of chronic … [Read more...]
It was quite the line up at the recent IASP conference: Tracey, Apkarian, Flor, Crombez, Iannetti, Moseley …the groupies were gathering around a melting pot of pain-full ideas.One such thought provoking notion was the search for “the ‘hurt’ in the brain”, in association with a staunch refuting of the use of the ‘pain signature’ … [Read more...]
I just read a fascinating paper by Pollatos and colleagues[1] in a recent issue of Pain. This paper evaluated the relationship between interoception (ie, the ability to consciously perceive signals from the body) and pain perception. This study was based on the theory that emotive stimuli initiate changes in physiological and bodily processes and … [Read more...]
And now you’re going to pay! Perceptions of injustice can emerge from a variety of conditions such as injury as the result of another’s actions – or in the case of not installing appropriate safety procedures – inactions - the experience of undeserved or irreparable loss or if the individual is exposed to a situation that transgresses human … [Read more...]
When we ask whether something in medicine is validated by science, the basic approach is to demonstrate biological plausibility (basic science research) as well as actual real-world efficacy (public health research). In other words, it is more interesting when something that works is actually supported by known biological mechanisms. We feel that … [Read more...]
Scientific conferences usually have a poster section which provide a rich and condensed source of some of the research that is currently being done around the globe. The International Association for the Study of Pain congress in Milan had a huge array, hundreds of new posters every day, ranging from sleep disorders to the genetic determinants … [Read more...]
This is an auspicious day. On this day in 2009 BiM published its first blog post. We have come a long way since a conversation a bit over three years ago when Heidi persuaded Lorimer to try blogging as a new way to help overcome the divide between scientist and clinician.Now we have about 3,800 visits to the site EVERY week from all over the … [Read more...]
Opioids. We all know what they are and that there are a lot of them going around, but it wasn’t until I was asked to write this blog on the information overloading review by Manchikanti and friends (2010) that I realised quite the extent. And to tell you the truth, it’s painfully scary!In a nutshell, well over half of the review pumped out … [Read more...]
In a past life I worked as an auto-electrician in a local car dealer. I was kept busy, as Australian build-quality ensures a steady flow of cars in need of repair. The process was relatively simple. A car would come in to the workshop, I would diagnose the problem, replace the faulty part and send it on its way. For the most part, it wouldn’t … [Read more...]
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