I hope that you have had a restful, joy-filled time over the festive period. Now thoughts turn toward the New Year when the clinics re-open.
** We will continue to follow the Covid-19 guidelines.
The clinic schedule is outlined below, before a few words on the hope we can have with regards overcoming persistent pain.
Clinics re-open
The clinics re-open on Tuesday 4th Jan.
Online sessions on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Face to face clinics in Chelsea (by Sloane Square) on Mondays & Thursdays.
Face to face clinics in Harley Street on Fridays.
You can get in touch this week by email if you would like to book.
hope
Moving on from one year to the next can often feel like an opportunity to do something better. The New Year’s resolution.
Many start off well, but find that their efforts fizzle out. Forming new habits can seem so hard to maintain. Yet there are some simple ways to maximise your chances. A blog to follow will look at these steps.
When is comes to persistent pain, people often tell me that they have little or no hope. This is understandable when their treatments have failed to deliver adequate relief or had any meaningful impact upon their lives.
It is encouraging to see more attention on the problem of pain and the way it affects people. Raising awareness of the problem of pain has been one of my purposes for many years.
There is often surprise when I provide the numbers: people in pain across the globe and the economic costs. Neither capture the sense of suffering.
Dopesick, the recent TV programme on Disney+ goes some way on this, although the angle is more on the issue of addiction to an opiate.
Despite more coverage, few are exposed or know the latest understanding of pain. It is this that gives great hope.
From a coming together of scientists and philosophers has emerged new thinking. This helps us to explain people’s experiences to them and create a practical way forward–understand your pain and move on to shape a positive future.
Hence great hope.
We now have a model that can seemingly answer all the questions we have about pain. The existing predominant biomedical model in healthcare does not. In fact, the latter often takes people down the wrong path as they continue to seek a physical explanation for their pain. But that is not how pain works.
Pain and injury, pain and tissue state, pain and pathology do not have a linear relationship. They often don’t have a good relationship at all.
In persistent pain there is a stuckness. An on-going prediction that pain is the best explanation for what is happening right now, for the person in that particular situation. To get better, is to become unstuck. That is what we look at doing. Creating new predictions that you are and can get better and healthier.
Within in this lie all the practices, strategies, exercises and the ways you implement them with encouragement and guidance. But, off the back of a new understanding of your experiences, which is so important in giving meaning and allaying fear.
This in mind, the future is getting brighter and brighter.
RS
** For more and to book, see here