Chronic Pain Australia National Pain Survey
Yep, it's another call for your lived experience. I know how exhausting and affecting these surveys can be. I approach surveys with a personal mental measure of worthiness and value. In [...]
Yep, it's another call for your lived experience. I know how exhausting and affecting these surveys can be. I approach surveys with a personal mental measure of worthiness and value. In [...]
When will patients be understood and listened to?! It’s obviously necessary to have a peak body addressing the needs of the pain community. Still, the frustration of [...]
Making the invisible visible You'll hear this wonderful reference in my chat with Giulia – to make what is invisible visible is one of her four goals while in the position of CEO at PainAustralia. I found Giulia incredibly down-to-earth and easy to connect with. Of course, with six children, you instantly know she understands pain (and is highly able!!), but her admission that she had never thought of the pain she experienced as chronic really struck me.
I'm an author of What Injured Workers With Complex Claims Look For in Online Communities: Netnographic Analysis, now published in one of the world's best medical journals.
'His most revolutionary finding was the utter lack of evidence for either axons or dendrites fusing and forming networks like those described by Golgi. He observed that, on the contrary, it seemed neurons did not need to touch to communicate. They only had to be contiguous for signals to be transmitted from one to the other. (The term “synapse”, used to describe the structure that permits a neuron to pass on its signal, would not be coined, by Charles Sherrington, until 1897.)
In what's becoming a life trek in the aim of defining my ongoing pain issue, there's a pattern I'm beginning to see. Most often when I read educational material and it feels like it's beginning to gell with my experience, I feel a suction begins to the words. I'm drawn into the paragraphs of the researcher/s and excitement kicks in. 'I'm going to find the definition, this person is speaking my language!' It gets wilder and wilder – think Willy Wonka's crazy boat ride (below, but hold on to your pelvis!) and the findings and resources amount to great support material. I begin to believe – 'this is IT!' But Like Willy Wonka's crazy boat ride, somewhere along the way it gets freaky, the definition starts to go off my track and as I keep reading I'm feeling that I'm coming unstuck.
A few months before I decided to ease on the advocacy, I contacted my dear friend Dr John Quintner asking him if he was up for a followup interview. Ever willing to [...]
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. Although famous for her colorful self-portraits and associations with celebrities Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, less known is the fact that she had lifelong chronic pain. Frida Kahlo developed poliomyelitis at age 6 years, was in a horrific trolley car accident in her teens, and would eventually endure numerous failed spinal surgeries and, ultimately, limb amputation. She endured several physical, emotional, and psychological traumas in her lifetime, yet through her art, she was able to transcend a life of pain and disability. Of her work, her self-portraits are conspicuous in their capacity to convey her life experience, much of which was imbued with chronic pain. Signs and symptoms of chronic neuropathic pain and central sensitization of nociceptive pathways are evident when analyzing her paintings and medical history. This article uses a narrative approach to describe how events in the life of this artist contributed to her chronic pain. The purpose of this article is to discuss Frida Kahlo's medical history and her art from a modern pain sciences perspective, and perhaps to increase our understanding of the pain experience from the patient's perspective.
March 1, 2007 my life changed in a massive way. I’m not one for getting tense about anniversaries – it’s all too emotional and I feel it holds me back allowing pain [...]
(Cut to the chase, I want to support the Pain Revolution 2018. Image: Lorimer and Soula at the Pelvic Pain Foundation of Australia Melbourne launch) I’ve got a soft spot for Professor [...]