Wow. Just wow. Another San Diego Pain Summit is in the books! The fifth SDPain and my fifth (I’m a lifer). I’m still trying to weave together all the beautiful threads present throughout the Summit, so this will be the first in a series of posts. It will be more impressions than details, with future posts delving into the talks →
In my last post I shared some thoughts on pain education and the phrase ‘pain is an output of the brain‘. I compared pain as output to pain as a lived, conscious, complex experience that people feel. From my perspective, describing pain as an output robs the experience of pain’s harsh, all-encompassing, life-changing reality. We are not machines producing outputs. →
This is something I have been thinking about for quite sometime and recent conversations pushed me to finish this post. I’m not a fan of saying pain is an output of the brain, and I’ll lay out why (please hear me out). I do anticipate some pushback, based on previous chats. Because of that, I want to make it clear →
Psychological. What do you think when you see that term? Be honest with yourself, what’s going through your head right now? When you think about the word psychological or the phrase ‘psychological factors’, what comes to mind? I ask because I have seen misconceptions abound when it comes to the P word. Misconceptions about the term ‘psychological’ I have seen →
I attended Rey Allen’s course on DermoNeuroModulating (DNM) in Boulder, Colorado last month and have been processing all that I learned and experienced there, with much more processing to do. But while it’s still fresh I want to share some of my initial thoughts and impressions. I’ll start with that I highly recommend the course. It was thought-provoking, engaging, interactive, →
I would like to make a plea. A plea to stop framing pain as the enemy, a thing to be battled, defeated, beat, eradicated. A thing not to be tolerated, to be vilified and stamped out. Perhaps our emphasis on pain as evil, pain as punishment, pain as suffering is only serving to make pain worse. Perhaps using warlike, military →
This is part 2 of my initial musings on the 2nd annual San Diego Pain Summit, it has to be two parts because there was so much good stuff it was way too much to include in one post. Here’s Part 1 if you missed it which went over stress, motivational interviewing, acceptance, creativity, and being human. Awesome, right? On to →
I am just a few days home from the San Diego Pain Summit (check out #sdpain on various social media sites to check out the action!) and my mind is awhirl with thoughts, ideas, reflections, questions, people, pain, approaches…so much so that I don’t know what to write right off! But I do want to get some thoughts down that I →
I think about pain a lot, not my own pain so much anymore but pain in a general sense, as much as there can be a general sense, in order to figure out how best to help other people to change their own experience of pain in order to live a full, meaningful, valued life right now, even if pain is present. →
I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but the post I thought I was going to write isn’t the post that I am now writing. This post was supposed to be a follow up to the post I wrote two months back (two months!) about how Simon Roost Kirkegaard helped me to change my pain by gently challenging some →
This whole chronic pain thing has been quite the path to navigate over the past 5+ years, and I have discovered a lot of things along the way. I’ve learned a lot about pain science and a lot about the art of living with pain. I’ve learned that pain is incredibly complex, just as people are incredibly complex. But I’ve →
Forgive me if this post is pretty similar to the last one (and a bit of a rant) but I’m all fired up right now after seeing another headline on social media that read “Pain: It’s all in your head”. ARGH!!! As someone living with pain, and who regularly hears from others living with pain, headlines like these really get →