“Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!” Ernst Jüngers (1895 - 1998) I've been chatting and sharing thoughts on philosophy, creativity and art with a colleague, Eduan Breedt. After much discussion I invited Ed to share some of his musings in a blog. Take it away Ed! What [...]
Physiotherapy is one of the caring professions. It lies alongside Medicine, Nursing and the other Allied Health Professions. Every single human on the planet is entitled to healthcare, and whilst some populations of the world don’t not get adequate healthcare, there are others that are subjected to overdiagnosis and overtreatment (Maher, O’Keeffe, Buchbinder, & Harris, [...]
When this question popped in my head, it sparked my curiosity. I had been reading through Explain Pain recently and I got a sense of something that perturbed me. I wondered if it had something to do with the necessity of the inherent nature of duality. So, as I often do, I thought I would [...]
Why is it that people living with pain upon seeing a healthcare professional often report, “ I have been told that it’s all in my head” and that the central focus of pain management programs are towards living well and not what people living with pain commonly report – the desire for pain reduction. Admittedly, [...]
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, [...]
