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 →
I recently attended the third annual San Diego Pain Summit (I’ve been to all three!) and was fortunate to be the patient demo for Peter O’Sullivan‘s Cognitive Functional Therapy workshop. (for a review of the whole workshop, check out Diane Jacob’s post.) Funny thing was, heading into it I thought I was going to be the wrong kind of patient →
How do we get better if we have to constantly prove we’re in pain? And does that constant need to prove we’re in pain prevent us from getting better? In recent posts I wrote about the shame I felt after developing chronic pain and how I’ve been working through that shame. They were the hardest posts I’ve ever written, my most vulnerable by far. And →
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 have had a lot of interactions with folks over the past couple of weeks about the changes that need to take place, and that are taking place, in the treatment and management of chronic pain and I’m ecstatic! I’ve heard amazing stories from people who are successfully managing their pain and truly LIVING their lives. I’ve also heard stories →
Yesterday one of my pain heroes, Bronnie Lennox Thompson over at Health Skills, posted an article that really resonated with me called ‘Deciding When to Say When: Pain Cure? Or Pain Managed? I left a pretty lengthy reply on her blog post, two of them, actually, and felt like they contained some thoughts I should share with you all as well about →
In part 1 of this series, I talked about how when we have chronic musculoskeletal pain, our world’s can become pretty small and how in those smaller worlds, we don’t move in the ways we used to or move as much as we used to. It hurts, after all. When we’ve been hurting for a long time, it’s easy to associate →
At some point along the way in writing this blog and trying to figure out this whole chronic pain thing, I went from learning about and understanding more about the science of pain to actually living what I know (well, mostly living what I know, I have my moments). I didn’t really notice it myself, at least not until it was →
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 →
I recently wrote about how my thoughts on movement have changed over the past couple of years (part 1 and 2), and I thought I’d delve a bit more into the evolution of those thoughts and why I posted them. Why I think our emphasis needs to shift a bit from the overly formulaic and prescribed movement to exploring enjoyable →
As many of you know, I have had my share of struggles over the past few years, trying to successfully navigate a few changes of direction along my life’s course, in particular injury, medical retirement from my career as a firefighter/paramedic and ongoing pain issues. I’ve had my fair share of angst-ridden freak outs about what I was going to do →
In the first part of this post on movement and pain I talked a bit about how I didn’t think about movement and posture much outside of the gym and lifting heavy things during training; how after I got injured, had surgery, and had persistent pain, I obsessed about movement and posture ALL THE TIME, to my detriment; and how →
My thinking on movement and it’s relation to pain has shifted pretty dramatically over the past couple of years. Before I got hurt, before my surgery and my pain issues, I was a gym rat who loved working out and did a lot of physical training at work. In the gym and on the training grounds, I was a form fanatic, largely in →
My brother was out for the past week with his girlfriend, it was a wonderful trip, as it always is when I get to see my bro (that’s him in the pic with me), but he said something to me that really got me thinking, something that kind of brought together a number of ideas for me, a culmination of →