Pain Self-management Brochure from Pain BC

Pain self-management brochure from Pain BC - informative for people in pain and an excellent resource to which we should refer our patients in pain.

http://www.painbc.ca/sites/default/files/pdf_files/Pain%20BC%20brochure%2012-09-13.pdf

AsapSCIENCE Videos...Short, fun, interesting doses of (neuro)Science

AsapSCIENCE  produces short videos that help explain science in a fun and interesting way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/AsapSCIENCE

Here are a couple examples:

THE SCIENCE OF PROCRASTINATION AND HOW TO MANAGE IT

(very useful!)

THE SCIENTIFIC POWER OF MUSIC

The Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems of a Human Being

12 TED Talks on Understanding the Brain

Yikes.  There's some seriously good content in here...
Ramachandran, Merzenich, Blakemore, Sachs... and well, eight others(!)
Enjoy.

http://blog.ted.com/2012/09/24/12-talks-on-understanding-the-brain/

Memories of Music are Different

A really interesting article:

Scientists Confirm that Memories of Music Are Stored in Different Part of Brain than Other Memories

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/11670/20120822/scientists-confirm-memories-music-stored-different-part-brain.htm

Researchers in Berlin studied a man who has lost all of his memories but has retained his ability to remember and learn songs.

If this topic interests you, check out Oliver Sachs "Musicophilia" for many more stories about the unique relationship of music with our brains.

DizzyFix App: Guided help for treating people with BPPV

Here's an interesting app: "You place your phone on the patient’s forehead. DizzyFix’s diagrams walk you through the steps needed for the Dix-Hallpike and Epley’s maneuvers, including a real-time display of exactly what path and angle to move the patient’s head through, and a timer to introduce appropriate pauses.

Here is an article on this:

http://thischangedmypractice.com/2012/09/24/dizzyfix-app/

And the app itself:

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/dizzyfix/id368171014?mt=8

Lorimer Moseley - 4 part interview on Pain (2010)

Lorimer Moseley's interview on ABC from 2 years ago, on Pain, part 1 through 4. Range from 7.5 to 9.5 minutes each.  Invest the 30-35 minutes in these, and listen, listen, and re-listen...EXCELLENT INTERVIEW!  Understanding this content is crucial, and learning how to teach and integrate this material is crucial too.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

TED Ed - How do Pain Relievers Work?

Another in the series of TED-Ed videos. 

The Science of “Chunking,” Working Memory, and How Pattern Recognition Fuels Creativity

Recently discovered www.brainpickings.org, which is a treasure chest of interesting posts.  Seriously, if you can't find several postings that interest you, you may not actually have a pulse and/or brain.

This recent posting is particularly interesting.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/04/the-ravenous-brain-daniel-bor/

"The main purpose of consciousness is to search for and discover structured chunks of information within working memory, so that they can then be used efficiently and automatically, with minimal further input from consciousness."

"Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns — any hook in the data that will aid our performance and understanding. We constantly look for regularities in every facet of our lives, and there are few limits to what we can learn and improve on as we make these discoveries."

Read on.  Very interesting.

Deep versus shallow models of Treatment

Continuing on with this thread, as it really does feel like we have been a little lacking in the social and psycho parts of our biopsychosocial models for pain.  Or is it a socialpsychobio model?  

Thanks again to Diane Jacobs, for the great post.

http://humanantigravitysuit.blogspot.ca/2012/09/deep-versus-shallow-models-of-treatment.html

Deep versus shallow models of Manual therapy

http://humanantigravitysuit.blogspot.ca/2012/09/deep-versus-shallow-models-of-manual.html

I suspect that this posting will resonate most directly with PT's, but it is also important for any therapist that works with their hands.  It is written by Diane Jacobs, a PT who has been very active in promoting an interactor model of manual therapy.  

From Diane F Jacobs, PT and Jason L Silvernail, DPT, DSc, FAAOMPT; Therapist as operator or interactor? Moving beyond the technique. J Man Manip Ther. 2011 May; 19(2): 120–121.
"the context of the treatment including the technique, the provider, the participant, the environment, and the interaction between these factors may contribute to patient outcomes.’ It is precisely this interaction between various factors that we need to consider, and not simply the performance of one or more techniques as an ‘operator.’ We believe this interactive model to also be scientifically congruent with the emerging explanatory model of the multifactorial, biopsychosocial pain experience, the neuromatrix."

Enjoy the post and I invite you to explore deeper into these ideas, her blog (http://humanantigravitysuit.blogspot.ca/), as well as SomaSimple (http://www.somasimple.com/), a great place to learn more about these concepts.

Soulless Bodies and Bodiless Souls

This is a tremendously important and interesting  post from Todd Hargrove at BetterMovement.org

http://www.bettermovement.org/2012/souless-bodies-bodiless-souls/

Hargrove speaks of reviewing many different approaches to manual therapy. "Some ideas are good, some are not so good. And some are rather obviously wrong, but somehow extremely resistant to correction in the face of huge amounts of conflicting evidence. And they seems to pop up everywhere, in different therapies that have different origins, like a weed that always needs to be pulled. Of this latter group of ideas, two different patterns of thinking really stand out in my mind."

1) Structuralism:

the tendency to treat the body as a mindless piece of meat, while ignoring the role of the brain in giving it all the qualities we actually care about, like how it moves and feels. Much education for PTs remains mired in structuralism, and fails to incorporate new and interesting information from neuroscience and pain science.

2) Vitalism:

the idea that there is some essential force or energy (chi, prana, elan vital, the breath of life) that is unique to life, that can be manipulated by a therapist to optimize a client’s health. Much education at massage schools, alternative medicine schools include a healthy dose of vitalism, and has little grounding in basic physics and neuroscience.

Excellent food for thought as we try to move forward in our disciplines and to create a schema that works and makes sense for our patients and makes sense relative to basic science.

Read the whole posting, as he really does explain some of the reasons why we tend to think in these dualistic ways.

NEUROMATRIX Model of Pain

Written for PT's by an American PT, this post summarizes the importance of understanding the Neuromatrix Model of Pain and integrating it into our practice.  It is equally important for everyone on the interdisciplinary team to understand it as well.

http://forwardthinkingpt.com/2012/08/28/attention-pts-look-at-this-image-its-important-real-important/

Neuroplasticity & the Feldenkrais Method

An excellent 10 minute interview with Michael Merzenich, a well known neuroscientist at the University of California. So many great thoughts, ideas, and ways to think about movement and neural processes.

http://www.bettermovement.org/2012/merzenich-interview-on-neuroplasticity-and-the-feldenkrais-method/

I love this quote:
"It is better to try to move to a point in space in 100 different speeds in 100 different ways … than to move 200 times in the same way to get to that point in space.

…
We are trying increasingly to build this into all of our cognitive training exercises that we do. Because we know that that’s really what the brain wants – to be able to set up the conditions by which it can solve the task in almost any circumstance."

Engaging the idea of sharpening our movement mind. Choosing movements that are novel, interesting, curious, exploratory and functionally relevant.  We should pay attention while doing them.  In other words, don’t just go through the movements, make sure they have some meaning, or the brain will properly ignore them.

Sounds like fun, huh!

Making Sense of Touch - The role of C-tactile fibers in gentle touch and emotion

Recently had this post forwarded to me by a colleague.  This article really illustrates how diverse our sensory system is, and how diverse it's connections are into our brains.
C-tactile fibers appear to only respond to gentle touch, and have a greater emotional connectivity.  This is being explored with regards to our social bonding behaviours, in our development/infancy right up to adult life.

http://the-scientist.com/2012/09/01/pleasant-to-the-touch/