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...]
“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...]
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...]
(continued from last post)…Socio-cognitive models have been used by health psychologist to increase our understanding of a variety of health behaviours. What about disability associated with low back pain? If we can think of disability as made up of specific behaviours then and if these behaviours are intentional it follows that people with … [Read more...]
For my first BIM post I wanted to blog about an article that I read some years ago that had probably the biggest impact on my thinking on low back pain and disability and 15 years later still informs the way that I think about pain and disability.Around the mid 1990s when I first started research in low back pain a UK-based health psychologist … [Read more...]
James is Manager of the BiM research group at NeuRA. James is a veritable expert at this sort of thing - having been Manager of the Back Pain Research Group at Sydney University and the George Institute. His research interests are in back pain and clinical pain.James is possibly the most interesting manager in the world - former club … [Read more...]
I have just come across an intriguing paper in Psychological Science by Travis Carter and his mates in Chicago. They did an experiment in which Americans who were filling out political surveys did so with either a small American flag in the corner of the screen, or nothing in the corner of the screen. They analysed the participants’ responses … [Read more...]
A while back Ben Wand blogged here about grey matter density changes in the brain and chronic pain – and particularly about a study demonstrating grey matter density reductions in patients with arthritic hip pain that reversed to a degree after successful hip replacement surgery.A new study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience by David … [Read more...]
Quick reminder from last post: The aim of our study[1] was to evaluate the assumptions that were made when translating the individual study criteria[2-6] (eg, all the criteria from the original subgrouping studies) into the classification algorithm.To evaluate the impact of these changes made to the individual study criteria, we recruited 250 … [Read more...]
I always feel a bit embarrassed when I partake in blatant self-promotion; however, as this blog post aims to foster discussion rather than self-promote I hope to ease my guilty conscience. So….I’m here to chat about the main study of my PhD that just came out in the April issue of Physical Therapy.[1] To start off with, I have to acknowledge … [Read more...]
I must have been a very good boy last year because Santa brought me some lovely books. One of these was “Naming Nature” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon and it outlines the history of biological classification. A major theme in the book is the conflict between the evolving science of taxonomy (no pun intended) and how its findings conflict with our … [Read more...]
Some time ago, a very impressive person by the name of Helen, came and had coffee at a pretty average cafe in Oxford, hoping to extend stuff we had done with left/right hand judgements to back pain. She did a great job and we ended up publishing what I think is an interesting paper in British Journal of Sports Medicine. Well, I have recently … [Read more...]
Recently, I attended a conference in Melbourne – the International Low Back Pain Forum for Research in Primary Care. This conference is organised by researchers who are interested in low back pain epidemiological research in – can you guess it? – primary care. Now the cool thing about this conference is that it has no big corporate or … [Read more...]
Diagnosing low back pain is a nightmare. It established that apart from the 15% of back pain cases which can be attributed to a specific spinal pathology, the majority of cases fall under the unsatisfactory umbrella label of “non-specific low back pain”.I was discussing with a colleague a new review that, while admittedly light on data, … [Read more...]
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