Research into the role of the brain in chronic pain
Qu. What do a rat, a fur coat, and a Santa mask have in common? Ans. Ethically dodgy science! ‘Little Albert’ was the victim of early 19th century psychology experimentation. At nine months of age he was given a white rat, and then frightened by a loud noise whenever he reached for it. Naturally, he came to fear white rats. Surprisingly, he … [Read more...]
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...]
“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...]
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...]
There is nothing like a good thinking session to kick off the new year. In their new paper, just published in Pain Medicine, the dulcet tones of A/Prof Milton Cohen and partners have been transformed to print in what is a very interesting critique of the theory of pain as a disease. Or, as they put it, 'pain-as-a-disease'. It really is a tricky … [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...]
Seeing another person jam their fingers in the car door is enough to make even the toughest of us wince. But for some people, seeing another person hurt themselves causes more than just an “ooooo” or an “ahhhh”. It can trigger an actual real experience of pain: “mirror pain”.But how is this possible? The important thing to remember … [Read more...]
Living with chronic pain can be miserable. Not only are there the nagging aches and pains of every day life, but there might also be forgetfulness, anxiety, depression, or difficulty concentrating as well.Researchers don’t yet know whether these ‘cognitive deficits’ are caused by pain itself, or whether it’s naturally more forgetful, … [Read more...]
In every-day life, painful events do not occur in isolation but often comprise input from additional sensory modalities. As a consequence, certain sensory inputs, like the visual percept of a needle approaching our skin when getting an injection, are inseparably linked to pain. To reduce the pain, health professionals often advise us to not look at … [Read more...]
When you expect an activity to evoke pain, when and why you decide to avoid or persist that activity? Until recently, this question has been mainly looked at from theories emphasizing the role of pain beliefs, with lots of research demonstrating that particularly fear of pain/movement makes people often avoid activity. Ignored in these theories, … [Read more...]
A Learning Theory Perspective on Pain-related Fear in Chronic Pain Every saga has a sequel – well in the previous blog post on learning and pain-related fear in chronic pain, I explained how pain-related fear can be acquired through associative learning, that is, the systematic pairing of a neutral movement (conditioned stimulus = CS) with a … [Read more...]
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