One of the principles I use with treating chronic pain is exposure therapy. This involves doing the very things that cause pain. If we can learn to do these things from a different mental perspective (move from it’s damaging to it’s not harmful), we can retrain the brain’s response to a trigger. In this study, […]
Self-efficacy is your belief in your own abilities to deal with various situations. Wanted to share a Journal of Pain 2018 review study that compiled data from 27 previous studies on self-efficacy and the prognosis of chronic musculoskeletal pain. We need more quality studies in this area but the results are in line with what […]
I see the Nocebo effect in so many of my chronic pain and chronic health patients. It’s not talked about as much as it should, even though we have solid research it plays a big part in health symptoms. The nocebo, as mentioned in the article below, is the “sibling with a dark side” to […]
I have never forgotten a quote I read years ago that said: ‘What you believe is what your life will be.’ I wanted to share this study from Stanford which shows how beliefs directly impact physiology. Just by telling people they had a certain gene for obesity or exercise tolerance (which was not true) caused […]
Nice summary in link below by Dr. Siegel from Harvard about the power of the placebo. What is the placebo: Your beliefs. With chronic pain that doesn’t go away, we know the brain has been shown to be a big part of persistent pain. When I work with chronic issues, one the first things I […]
Irritable bowel, chronic widespread pain, chronic fatigue and related syndromes are prevalent and highly overlapping in the general population. This is the title of a new 2020 study, which just reaffirms what we know here- these issues should not be seen as separate medical conditions but together as part of one condition, which the researchers […]
Research evidence in 9 of 11 studies show that lifting with a flexed (bent over) spine is NOT a risk factor for low back pain. We need more studies but what the current research says falls in line with common sense. The back is designed to flex forward. We need to relax the spine more […]
Great to see more and more awareness coming forth in our PT profession about the understanding of pain, how we think about it, and how we treat it. Recent Feb 2020 article titled: What have Pain Sciences brought to Physiotherapy (PT)? Results: “Scientific research on pain has largely converged in support of three ‘game-changing’ concepts […]
Here’s a recent 2019 study showing that Olympic level volleyball players who are playing with no symptoms have extensive “pathology” in the shoulder. The reason I share these studies is to educate people that many times structural ‘abnormalities’ in and of themselves do not have direct relationships to pain. We need to look at the […]
What better study to show the power of negative thinking (catastrophizing) and how it can contribute to chronic pain than looking at people who have had a whole knee joint replaced but continue to have pain afterwards. If you take out a damaged joint and it’s the cause of pain, the pain should go away. […]
