Research into the role of the brain in chronic pain
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...]
(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...]
Lewis Carroll paints a picture of a world where very little makes sense; an adult wonderland seen through a child’s eyes. Yet, who is to say that what we see and the behaviours that we adopt really make sense to others?I was reading (not Alice in Wonderland this time) an interesting paper recently that suggested that when natural ambiguities … [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 I wrote a piece about Consciousness and Pain, in which I argued that consciousness might be the key ingredient for pain. I even tried my hand at a bit of maths, with this little equation (not to be taken too exactly): pain = nociception + consciousness. I got a great response to this post. People had some really interesting … [Read more...]
I have a couple of mates who are veritable smoke-stacks. They love smoking but sort of hate being a smoker. I must confess that, at least within my community, smoking is now officially uncool and my mates are sick of people telling them good reasons to give up. Well, as if they needed another reason, here is evidence that smoking hurts. This is … [Read more...]
Body image means different things to different people. To many it refers to how one feels about one's body. To us, it refers to how one's body feels to oneself and how one perceives its shape, orientation, agency and ownership. Hopefully you can see that body image is critical to pain, because pain is, we reckon, necessarily felt in one's body. … [Read more...]
By Flavia Di PietroI think about this a lot. It leads me to ponder the distinction between pain and nociception. We found a chapter on exactly this in a great book we are slowly reviewing at BiM – The Science of Pain. The chapter’s title grabbed me: Conciousness and Pain. It’s really got me thinking about both, and in particular … [Read more...]
What type of person are you?? When tough times come around – whether it is stress at work, a painful injury, or forced participation in Secret Santa – what do you do? Some people, those lone wolf types, find relief in being alone, taking some time to regroup, and dealing with the problem themselves. Others, aka the support group enthusiasts, … [Read more...]
Some take the tube, others the train...The Amazing Race in the brain It makes sense that we need to process and respond to some stuff we see quicker than other stuff we see. Take for instance a lion versus a lollipop. This paper by Pessoa and Adolphs explores the mechanisms behind emotional processing of visual stimuli, and more specifically … [Read more...]
If you knock your hand arm on something sharp, what is the first thing you do? I bet most of you say 'rub it better'. We take that automatic response for granted but some very clever people in London, which is in England, have taken a very elegant (LJ take note of the use of that word here!) approach to investigating it. Marjolein Kammers from … [Read more...]
I’m a little late to this one but an interesting disagreement recently emerged in the letters to the editor in the journal Pain. This focused around a recent study from the impressive Arthritis Research Campaign National Primary Care Centre at Keele University, UK into the psychological obstacles to recovery from low back pain.The study … [Read more...]
Some time ago, I wrote this paper, at the request of the journal Physical Therapy Reviews, on reconceptualising pain. It is a little old now but it has come to be a bit of a position paper. The position has four fundamentals, none of which will be very surprising to anyone I imagine:(i) pain does not provide a measure of the state of the … [Read more...]
Professor Troels Jensen's clever group of researchers have published an interesting paper in the European Journal of Pain. We were thinking about writing a little spiel on it so you can get the idea and then we thought - what about asking the authors? So we did. Fortunately for us, Lise Gormsen, who has now got her PhD via this work, kindly … [Read more...]
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