I see the Nocebo effect in so many of my chronic pain and chronic health patients. It’s not talked about as much as it should, even though we have solid research it plays a big part in health symptoms. The nocebo, as mentioned in the article below, is the “sibling with a dark side” to […]
I have never forgotten a quote I read years ago that said: ‘What you believe is what your life will be.’ I wanted to share this study from Stanford which shows how beliefs directly impact physiology. Just by telling people they had a certain gene for obesity or exercise tolerance (which was not true) caused […]
Nice summary in link below by Dr. Siegel from Harvard about the power of the placebo. What is the placebo: Your beliefs. With chronic pain that doesn’t go away, we know the brain has been shown to be a big part of persistent pain. When I work with chronic issues, one the first things I […]
Irritable bowel, chronic widespread pain, chronic fatigue and related syndromes are prevalent and highly overlapping in the general population. This is the title of a new 2020 study, which just reaffirms what we know here- these issues should not be seen as separate medical conditions but together as part of one condition, which the researchers […]
Research evidence in 9 of 11 studies show that lifting with a flexed (bent over) spine is NOT a risk factor for low back pain. We need more studies but what the current research says falls in line with common sense. The back is designed to flex forward. We need to relax the spine more […]
Great to see more and more awareness coming forth in our PT profession about the understanding of pain, how we think about it, and how we treat it. Recent Feb 2020 article titled: What have Pain Sciences brought to Physiotherapy (PT)? Results: “Scientific research on pain has largely converged in support of three ‘game-changing’ concepts […]
Here’s a recent 2019 study showing that Olympic level volleyball players who are playing with no symptoms have extensive “pathology” in the shoulder. The reason I share these studies is to educate people that many times structural ‘abnormalities’ in and of themselves do not have direct relationships to pain. We need to look at the […]
What better study to show the power of negative thinking (catastrophizing) and how it can contribute to chronic pain than looking at people who have had a whole knee joint replaced but continue to have pain afterwards. If you take out a damaged joint and it’s the cause of pain, the pain should go away. […]
New 2020 research study looked at 220 asymptomatic knees with MRI scans. What they found just adds more evidence to what we already know: structural ‘abnormalities’ do not cause pain in a lot of people. Here’s the conclusion in the author’s words: “Nearly all knees of asymptomatic adults showed abnormalities in at least one knee […]
In addressing chronic pain, we need to address the brain, not just the body. Scientific studies are pointing to that. Here’s a few quotes from this 2019 review research paper. “Several studies have investigated the brain areas associated with emotional aspects of pain. Baliki et al. showed that patients with persistent back pain had greater […]
