Recommended Viewing

Taming the beast- a video by Professor Lorimer Moseley

This video gives a nice simple introduction to pain science. It explains that pain is a protective response generated by the nervous system.  

The pain response can be very helpful when we injure ourselves because it makes us stop, protect and heal. But with long-term pain, this reaction can be misleading and very unhelpful. 

In the video they talk about how the nervous system can learn to give us pain too quickly and easily.  The key point of the video is that we can start to ‘unlearn’ and take the fear out of pain. 

How we think about pain affects how we experience it, so following that logic, if you learn to think differently, you should have a different experience of pain. Thinking differently involves understanding what is really happening in the body when pain is felt.  In this way something may still hurt but if you knew what was happening, it wouldn’t be so scary. 

In our groups we talk about how pain is both sensory and emotional, how there is  ‘ouch’ and anger/fear/guilt at the same time. Or put another way- an unpleasant physical and emotional feeling in the same instant.  

A large part of pain management involves changing how we respond to pain, often by understanding what is really going on with pain and thereby changing our relationship with it.  In the video they point out that it is important to know what it means when someone experiences pain- for example does it mean that something bad has happened in the body (which is what it feels like) or is it just more pain.

In a way I’ve explained the themes in this video, thousands of times.  I recognise that it is hard to believe the pain science especially when pain is high.  There is also the sensitivity that some people have that ‘it’s all in your head’.   Pain science isn’t accusing anyone of making their pain up, but rather it points out that pain is produced by the brain working with the body, which is what it does with everything else all of the time.  

Please give the video a play and see what you think. It doesn’t have all the answers and ultimately says something simple, but that simple message is new to many people and crucially important.