Research into the role of the brain in chronic pain
“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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
Doctors still debate about treating chronic pain with cannabis. At present, the evidence of benefit[1] does not clearly outweigh the long-term risks of cannabis to mental health.[2] Cannabis contains many chemicals but only delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) has significant pain-relieving properties. Unfortunately, THC is also responsible for the … [Read more...]
Imagine a cold winter day. Everything is covered by snow. You are getting ready to go out. Coat, scarf, wool cap, but on the table next to the main door there are your brand new gloves, one is blue the other one is red. How do we choose which glove corresponds to which hand? Most people automatically prepare, or imagine, moving one hand into the … [Read more...]
Well, what about those? Most researchers would suggest there aren't many of them. A quick review on PubMed will only give you a few useful hits, however it is estimated that about 70% of all people suffering from chronic nonspecific musculoskeletal pain manage to stay functioning at work. In actual fact this may in many cases be for the better, … [Read more...]
When little can be done to help make stressful experiences more tolerable, age-old adages encourage us to just “grin and bear it.” Although smiling might appear too simple to be an effective solution, new research suggests that smiling through stressful situations does have a beneficial impact on physical health.In our recently published … [Read more...]
Some of you may know that in March this year I swapped my Associate Professorship at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, for a volunteering position at Dhulikhel Hospital / Kathmandu University in Nepal. Let me first tell you something about the situation in Nepal, something about the hospital and physiotherapy, and then how you … [Read more...]
We have all experienced pain at some stage in our lives and anticipate pain as a consequence of injury. Despite this anticipation though we expect that with healing and time, pain will resolve. However, an acute pain can persist for many months and years, becoming chronic in its nature; a prospect difficult for many of us to imagine.Chronic … [Read more...]
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