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...]
There is no shortage of clinical guidelines for CRPS. Since 2010 we have had guidelines from the Netherlands, from the UK and in the last few months from the USA. Guidelines are always an interesting beast. They usually involve an exercise in evidence synthesis, consideration by a panel of experts, many of whom are (and I shudder to use the term) … [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...]
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...]
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...]
Most BiM readers will be familiar with a body of research indicating that chronic pain is associated with apparent structural changes in the brain. We’ve discussed this issue here at length (see here and here). These findings, principally of reductions in grey matter density across a smattering of brain regions, have led researchers, myself … [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...]
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...]
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...]
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