April 12th, 2023 11:33 am

PainAustralia Survey Report: Impact of opioid regulatory reforms on people living with chronic pain

By |2023-04-12T11:33:10+10:00April 12th, 2023|Categories: Blog, Learn, Professional Resources|Tags: , , , , |

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 [...]

April 8th, 2023 1:45 pm

My recent chat with PainAustralia’s new CEO, Giulia Jones – Giulia has quite the agenda!

By |2023-04-09T11:14:47+10:00April 8th, 2023|Categories: Advocacy, Blog, Online|Tags: , |

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. 

April 12th, 2022 8:53 pm

Soula Mantalvanos, Published Author of the Journal of Medical Internet Research

By |2023-01-24T16:12:25+11:00April 12th, 2022|Categories: Advocacy, Blog, Learn, Living, Online, Professional Resources, Workcover|Tags: , , , , , , |

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.  

February 4th, 2021 11:43 am

Early Illustrations of the Nervous System by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal

By |2021-02-04T11:43:53+11:00February 4th, 2021|Categories: Learn, Professional Resources|Tags: , |

'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.)

October 31st, 2020 11:50 am

Just Another Freaky Boat Ride

By |2020-10-31T11:56:45+11:00October 31st, 2020|Categories: Learn, Professional Resources|Tags: , , |

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.

June 9th, 2018 11:22 am

Frida Kahlo: Portrait of Chronic Pain

By |2018-06-09T11:31:59+10:00June 9th, 2018|Categories: Learn, Professional Resources, Read|Tags: , |

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.

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