“Perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. Perception is inference.” Atul Gawande Our brain does a fair bit of guess work. It is constantly reviewing, sorting, filtering, ignoring, acting on a constant barrage of conscious and subconscious information that it receives both from inside the body and from the environment. It […]
Pain is a bit like a musical number in the brain. It has lots of variations and speeds, different lengths and volumes depending on the audience. The music that is played when you stub your toe as you go up on stage to accept a prestigious award might have the volume and length turned right […]
It is tempting to brush aside chronic pain advice from well meaning health professionals because they don’t understand your pain. The advice is often geared towards just coping and getting on with life – functioning despite the pain. It often comes at the end of a course of treatment where nothing has really made much […]
Pain is problematic. As a society, chronic pain is said to cost $33billion per year (and those figures are from 2007). It is estimated that 1 in 4 Australians have chronic pain that has defied normal healing time. Pain gets a pretty bad rap. The thing is, it is necessary. How wonderful would it be […]
I’ve spent the last 8 years or so as a rehabilitation consultant, liaising between injured workers, employers, doctors and insurers to find the best way to assist a worker in the return to work process. A challenging job to say the least. A large percentage of the people I have worked with have had chronic […]