Persistent pain, in conditions such as complex regional pain syndrome and chronic low back pain, is associated with cortical changes and altered tactile acuity.[2-4, 6, 7] Tactile acuity is thus considered a clinical signature of primary somatosensory representation[5] in these conditions and is increasingly being assessed in clinical practice to … [Read more...]
Ride for Pain at your place – photos and movies are here
May 17, 2013 by 1 Comment
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...]
The far reach of disabling health care
May 14, 2013 by 2 Comments
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...]
Taking you on a roller-coaster ride with left right neck rotation judgments
May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Riding for pain with a Viking Spirit
May 3, 2013 by 1 Comment
On what looks like a very fresh Danish weekend, some fearsome warriors put on their Ride for Pain jerseys and took on the elements. Watch the day unfold in the latest Danish entry for the Cannes short-film awards, in the 'Raising awareness of the world's most burdensome health issue' category. httpv://youtu.be/gYSV4Ai-zSg … [Read more...]
Lives on hold
April 30, 2013 by 24 Comments
“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...]
A new direction for the fear avoidance model
April 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Nature or nurture in low back pain
April 23, 2013 by 4 Comments
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...]
Another uber-successful UniSA Ride for Pain
April 17, 2013 by 1 Comment
Sunday April 7th saw hundreds of cyclists take to the River or the Hills on an absolutely glorious Adelaide autumn day. The mercury nudged 30C and the spirits were even higher. Thanks to WorkCoverSA and, of course the University of South Australia, it was another very successful event. Over 250 cyclists took on the whole 100km and 100 of those … [Read more...]
Constraint-Induced Movement therapy for long-term walking impairment in multiple sclerosis
April 12, 2013 by 8 Comments
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...]
Pain at your finger tips
April 9, 2013 by 4 Comments
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...]
Teaching people about pain – why do we keep beating around the bush pt 2
April 4, 2013 by 84 Comments
Continued from previous post... All is not lost, however. There is an emerging body of literature that suggests that we can change the way people understand their pain. We can reconceptualize pain in a way that makes clear the distinction between tissue damage, nociception and pain. The bulk of the work in this area is guided by a model that … [Read more...]
Teaching people about pain – why do we keep beating around the bush
April 2, 2013 by 12 Comments
A frank approach to interpersonal communication brings with it some challenges, but having to dig oneself out of a hole, created by strategically avoiding the truth, is not one of them. This frank approach is well suited to science – the scientific process requires us to pursue and report the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We … [Read more...]
Classification based cognitive functional therapy for back pain
March 27, 2013 by 2 Comments
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...]
Clean teeth, bad back? Antibiotics for chronic low back pain.
March 22, 2013 by 34 Comments
It is unsurprising that there are few-to-no impressively effective treatments for chronic non-specific low back pain. The clue is in the “diagnostic” label. Non-specific low back pain represents the vast majority of cases for whom our traditional diagnoses don’t explain a great deal. If we can’t put our finger on what is causing it, we are … [Read more...]
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