Chronic Bodily Pain and The Dark Side of Neuroplasticity: Shedding Active Light upon New Experientia
Earlier last summer, I had the great privilege in attending the International Spine and Pain Institute’s Clinical Conference on Pain, held in Minneapolis, MN, June 20-22, 2014. This year’s conference title -“Every Joint has a Brain“ is equally desirable - but I’m likely to be busy getting my own doctoral degree research underway for 2015.
But I do want to share a particular highlight from the conference regarding a session that discussed the neurological processing of pain AND especially that pain signaling can continue long after ‘implicated’ tissues have long since healed. The perpetuation of pain signaling mechanisms and matrices - habitually occurring over and over again in generally the same way - is a major feature of chronic pain states.
From Keynote 2: Making Sense of Pain that Persists: Exploring the Dark Side of Neuroplasticity by Steve Schmidt, PT, M.Physio (manip), OCS, FAAOMPT, I have summarized highlights from his slide presentation and have embellished it with some of my own thinking from a diversity of resources -- among them, The Brain that Changes itself by Norman Doidge, MD.
