Kablooey! You have a bout of back pain. It's unpleasant and so off to the.... (insert health professional) you go. You tell your story, they ask a bunch of questions, do an assessment, a bit of jiggery pokery and then give you a couple of exercises to do (be it stickmen, printed or videos downloaded [...]
Diagnosis is an important part of healthcare provision. Quite simply, people want to know what’s wrong with them in order to know what can be done about it. Clinicians diagnose so to provide the person living with a disease, the appropriate treatment (Gifford, 2014). Historically, in musculoskeletal medicine diagnosis has taken the form of identifying [...]
Warning: This blog is lengthy, contains jargon, waffling and rabbit holes. In one of the scenes in the movie The Matrix, Morpheus introduces Neo to the Matrix for the first time. Morpheus explains the construct, a loading program, where anything can be loaded from clothing to equipment, training simulations, anything they need. Cue abstract from [...]
This month I decided to put me feet up and support the voice of my fellow colleagues. I get contacted by many clinicians, of all levels of experience, wanting to chat about where they should take their career. Many are sat at a crossroads unsure of which way to turn, with some even considering leaving [...]
Groundhog Day is a 1993 movie starring Bill Murray. Murray portrays Phil Connors, a cynical television weatherman covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennyslyvania, who becomes trapped in a time loop forcing him to relive the same day repeatedly. This short blog is a deep dive into Groundhog Day as an analogy for [...]
In my last post I shared my thoughts on the comparisons between dispositional reasoning and process based therapy, with the focus being on workable processes of change rather than trying to find the "magic bullet" of pain elimination. To try and explain this, I would like to reference parts of a chapter from Rethinking Causality, [...]
Physiotherapy has been going through some significant changes in the last 20-30 years. Probably one of the most significant is the paradigm shift from the biomedical to the biopsychosocial (BPS) model. The BPS model shifting the emphasis from tissue pathology to a systems based approach capturing biological, psychological and sociological components. Despite the argument that [...]
I do wonder what the response might be to the title of this blog? Physiotherapy within pain management is still very much in the midst of an explaining pain / CBT evolution, but I do wonder if we have disregarded what our peers in other professions have been questioning with respect to their own methods? [...]
Physiotherapists tend to have a bit of a reputation for jumping onto bandwagons. In writing this blog I am committing hypocrisy by admitting I am a strong proponent of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Yes, it’s true I can be accused of jumping onto a bandwagon. If I look up the meaning of bandwagon here’s [...]
There’s a moment in the Lord of the Rings, where Frodo and Sam are walking in the rocky terrain of the Misty Mountains trying to head towards Mordor. Sam speaks about the familiarity of the terrain and Frodo, jaded, responds with, “That’s because we’ve been here before, we’re going in circles” Eventually, it is Golum, [...]
