Neuroplasticity neuroschplacity

by Lorimer on September 2, 2010 · 0 comments

in Brain,Pasticity,Research

We (ok, I) have been a bit slow on the uptake here, but Mindhacks posted a typically excellent piece lamenting the use of ‘neuroplasticity’. Vaughan, in typically excellent style, argues that, because the brain is always changing – we can’t do anything really without something changing – the term is meaningless.  He goes so far [...]

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A Reflection on the Mirror Box

31 August 2010 Brain

I met a fellow called Max. He was impressive with his command of the facts.  He does some cool studies.  He’s not one of the Luddies.  And certainly not one of the hacks.  That is what happens when one is a bit too low on sleep.  Which I am. But Max is not. Max works [...]

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It is not your schnoz that matters

27 August 2010 Basic science

Solving the take-away coffee induced black-tipped nose problem A little while ago we ran an experiment of sorts to test the hypothesis that the length of one’s nose was positively related to the risk of getting a black spot on it while drinking a take-away coffee. That is, the longer your nose, the more likely you [...]

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Chronic Low Back Pain and Advanced Mathematics

25 August 2010 Back pain

It is tempting, in research, to apply the normal rules of summation – where adding one treatment that you think is effective to another treatment that you think is effective should give you a combined treatment that is more effective than either.  However, as Cormac Ryan from Glasgow Caledonian University points out, it does not [...]

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Teaching people about pain – a kind of position paper

23 August 2010 Abstracts

Some time ago, I wrote this paper, at the request of the journal Physical Therapy Reviews, on reconceptualising pain. It is a little old now but it has come to be a bit of a position paper. The position has four fundamentals, none of which will be very surprising to anyone I imagine: (i) pain [...]

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Misinformed Consent? What not to tell a patient with back pain

19 August 2010 Back pain

We just came across a fancy patient information form that was given to a patient after an assessment by a clinician. The form just blew our minds (but not in a good way) because it seemed to be the perfect clinical tool for generating ongoing pain and disability, and all by the simple process of [...]

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Of moose and maple syrup – a Canadian visits BodyinMind

16 August 2010 Back pain

I had the honour of spending the past week with the brilliant and extremely pleasant folks of the Body in Mind group at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA).  The type of work going on here is the definition of cutting edge in my opinion, and I’m sure I was only introduced to a small part of [...]

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Genetic predisposition to chronic pain

12 August 2010 Genetics

Tim Vaughan pretty much suggested that we comment on this paper which concerns a mouse study in which the scientists inflicted a neural injury and looked at a specific genetic marker in the mice who did and didn’t develop chronic symptoms consistent with pain. They also looked at the marker in post-surgical humans who developed [...]

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Anxiety and mood in people with fibromyalgia or neuropathic pain – different mechanisms

10 August 2010 Clinical science

Professor Troels Jensen‘s clever group of researchers have published an interesting paper in the European Journal of Pain.  We were thinking about writing a little spiel on it so you can get the idea and then we thought – what about asking the authors? So we did. Fortunately for us, Lise Gormsen, who has now [...]

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The genetics of dystonia in CRPS – not what we were expecting

5 August 2010 CRPS

The genetics of dystonia in CRPS – genes don’t seem to predispose or cause dystonia in CRPS. This doesn’t mean that there is no genetic contribution, but it does mean that the genes that underpin familial dystonia are not important in CRPS-dystonia.

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