My summer reading included Explain Pain. I’m a Therapist who treats many people in long term chronic pain through injury, stress, unresolved sporting injury and I’m always on the search for new information.
Explain Pain by David Butler & Lorimer Moseley
The book ‘Explain Pain’ aims to give clinicians and people the power to challenge pain and to consider new models for viewing what happens during pain. Once they have learnt about the processes involved they can follow a scientific route to recovery.
Butler and Moseley explain with all its facets of pain, how understanding ‘why’ emotions, thoughts beliefs and behaviours are important in perception of pain.
Offering varying reasons of when someone is in pain, basically it is the brain which decides whether something hurts or not, and only if the brain reads that the body in under threat. This did give reason to how different patients, having the same condition can be in such different levels of pain. They bring together the patients experiences of pain and neuroscience, no purple areas.
I found that they present their complex knowledge simply and engaging with cartoons for your patients to help them understand the mechanisms of pain of their pain. Enabling the person not to feel so afraid.