Placebo and nocebo are real physiological effects generated by our brains. They have the power to turn symptoms on, up, or down. Past research has found our expectations (positive and negative) are the primary reason why placebo or nocebo effects occur. This 2024 systematic review found there is something more than expectation alone that contributes […]
In the early 2000’s, I started to think more deeply about chronic pain and other chronic symptoms that were not getting better through traditional physical therapy (physiotherapy). I was working in an outpatient physical therapy clinic focusing primarily on treating worker’s compensation injuries. What I began to see myself was also starting to show up […]
I wanted to highlight how fear of movement because of a symptom (like pain) can generalize to other safe movements from the learning mechanisms in the brain. This is called avoidance generalization. This 2023 study looked at how many people with chronic symptoms (pain) learn to avoid behaviors that cause more symptoms. This is called […]
This was a nice review paper looking at how psychological trauma affects functional somatic symptoms (FSS) in the body. Functional means no specific identifiable medical cause is found in the body. What the researchers found through looking at the data from 71 different studies was that: “To our knowledge, this is the largest and most […]
This 2017 study looked at the relationship between beliefs about emotions, emotional suppression, and the global impact it has on fibromyalgia patients. Fibromyalgia is one of the conditions that has its roots from the brain and nervous system. I would imagine based on my personal observation, other brain and nervous system conditions would likely present […]
Chronic pain or chronic somatic symptoms are not the same as acute pain or acute somatic symptoms. Chronic symptoms are typically maladaptive and don’t represent a true threat in the body (like an acute tissue injury). Chronic symptoms are more likely to be driven and produced by a learned threat in the brain vs. something […]
This was a nice study showing how having an insecure attachment to a parental figure from childhood becomes a risk factor to having medically unexplained somatic symptoms (MUSS) later in adulthood. The study also highlighted that alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and expressing one’s emotions) mediated the association between anxious attachment and severity of somatic symptoms. The […]
Many people believe the weather has an impact on their pain or arthritis symptoms. This was a great review study looking at exactly that. Titled “Come rain or shine: Is weather a risk factor for musculoskeletal pain?” The authors reviewed data from 11 studies (15,315 participants), providing data on 28,010 events for seven musculoskeletal conditions. […]
There have been many studies linking the role of ACE’s to chronic disease later in life. I wanted to share a 2023 study here that looked to identify a cut-point for the number of ACE’s that would have a significant association with chronic disease later in life. The authors found after looking at data in […]
One of the areas in chronic pain that’s not as talked about is the role of identifying emotions and how the lack of knowing what you are feeling emotionally may emerge physically as somatic symptoms. Difficulty in identifying the emotions you are feeling is called alexithymia. Alexithymia has been implicated in multiple studies to have […]
