We have a tendency to live life in the fast lane. We receive vast amounts of information in a day, far more than we ever did. Imagine being a farmer in the 17th century. There would be little that was novel in your day, very few distractions. Someone pointed out that back then the loudest [...]
We are living through very strange times. How might this affect our health and in particular pain? If you have read any previous posts it is now very clear that pain is made up of many complex factors. It might be that not carrying out our usual routines are affecting our ability to deal with [...]
Whilst watching a brilliant talk by super cool neuroscientist Beau Lotto, (which I highly recommend ) I had one of those moments of insight. It was the realisation that there is one word that sums up the human condition- uncertainty. I have already blogged about predictive coding before, but feel as I need to [...]
I attended a conference on pain at Reading University a few months ago. The 2 days were fascinating, having speakers from a wide range of backgrounds. Dr Amanda Williams, UCL, gave a very interesting talk on pain in animals. She said that although chronic pain has been observed in farmed and domesticated animals, there has [...]
“You work so hard to fix yourself, but maybe what you need isn’t another tactic, another book, another five step plan. Maybe you don’t need to be fixed, maybe what’s really holding you back is the idea that you need to be fixed” - V Tugaleva. Mindfulness does not seek to fix you. Mindfulness is [...]
Mindfulness was first used therapeutically in the West in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn for the treatment of chronic pain. Perhaps what is mindfulness' biggest tool is to stop the tendency to try and escape your pain, either through distraction or by using substances such as prescribed or unprescribed medications to help blunt the experience. Mindfulness [...]
For a while now I have been attempting to understand Karl Friston's "Free Energy Principle" and it's relationship to pain. I thought I would now try and explain this theory, that has been taking the science world by storm. It is changing how we view not just pain, but also emotion, psychiatric illnesses and many [...]
Pain is such a complex event and the recently published guidelines in the Lancet on the treatment of back pain asks both practitioners and the public to change their views on the treatment of pain. It is recommending far less surgery, no more injections, less pain killers and to understand that pain means understanding the [...]
I have treated thousands of people over many years suffering from pains that have lasted well beyond the expected time a pain might be expected to be present for.Any pain that lasts more than 3 months is termed "chronic" although the fashion now is to term it "persistent" as this sounds a bit less fear [...]
Phenomenology comes from the Greek "to bring to light", or to study things as they appear. What has this to do with manual therapy?. I want to look at how chronic pain sufferers are treated in the healthcare system and how we can improve things using a phenomenological approach to their care. Chronic pain sufferers [...]
