Noigroup

Many people living with persistent pain describe feeling like a body part doesn’t belong to them, feels distorted, swollen, or damaged…

Perceptual research has opened new ways of thinking about pain.

As an experience influenced by multiple sources of information, including sensory input, context, and past experiences.

The hand is in the right location.

It looks like your hand.

It’s being touched at exactly the same time as your real hand.

Similarly, pain is an emergent experience based on many different factors, and it can help to explain why changing the way we make sense of pain can sometimes change the pain experience itself.

This is not to say that pain is an illusion – Rather, that Illusions like this can help to demonstrate the complexity of our experiences, including pain.

➡️Click below to learn more:

https://www.noigroup.com/graded-motor-imagery/

https://www.noigroup.com/noijam/gmi-finding-the-right-balance-for-recovery/

“I’m sore but I’m safe”

What you say during an exercise session may be part of the intervention.

A small study put 15 men through a squat session in four groups.

One did the session as normal. One got a placebo and was told it was a placebo. One got real creatine and was told it was creatine. The last got sugar but was told it was creatine.

Both groups who believed they’d had creatine completed more squats.

The group who got sugar and were told it was creatine group performed about the same as the group who actually received creatine.

Similarly, other trials demonstrate that positive verbal feedback during a treadmill run can improve oxygen consumption.

In another study, being told your first VO2max test was above average improved performance on the second attempt.

One way to interpret findings like these is through predictive processing:

The nervous system runs on predictions built from past experience. What the body can do, what a movement will cost, whether it’s safe etc...
..and new evidence can update those predictions.

How a clinician sets up an exercise, frames it, and provides feedback during it may be doing more than just loading the tissue.

It may be part of what the nervous system uses to update its predictions.

The words, the framing, and the feedback might not just be soft skills around the real treatment.

They might be part of it.

Exercise in the context of pain is much more than just trying to achieve exercise specific adaptations.

👇 If you want to learn more, register for Explain Pain Exercise Edition with Brendan Mouatt and Luke Postlethwaite in Cairns here: https://courses.noigroup.com/offers/UCoQEH8m/checkout

Have you ever tried to teach or ‘explain’ something to someone, only to be met with an unexpected response?

You were confident a piece of information would be helpful, but instead you got resistance or

How might the content of the education we develop change if we first identify and co-create meaning with people?

Pain science education isn't simply a didactic treatment approach.

People experiencing pain have their own individual concerns, challenges, barriers, and other contributing factors...

How might educational content change if we allow room to discuss uncertainty and individual concerns?

Brendon Haslam at EP3 Melbourne 🗣️

It’s come to our attention that we’ve never revealed the inner workings of the Noigroup office.

Just remember…

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Stay tuned for more 👀

One person. Ten MRI scans. Forty-nine different findings.

A 2017 study (Herzog and colleagues) sent the same patient with chronic low back pain to ten different MRI centres in a three-week window. Across the ten reports, radiologists collectively flagged 49 distinct findings. Not one of those findings appeared in all ten reports.

The bigger point isn't really about imaging. Pain and recovery have many moving parts, and the tools we use to make sense of them, scans, special tests, movement screens, rarely point to a single clear cause. They can't show us pain itself either.

If the problem is that layered, our treatment needs to be too. That's why we built Explain Pain Exercise Edition: a course for clinicians who want to work with that complexity rather than around it, and use exercise as part of the way forward.

Have you worked with a patient where the scans, tests or screens didn't quite add up with what you were seeing in the room? 👇

https://courses.noigroup.com/offers/UCoQEH8m/checkout