Supercharging Explain Pain

It’s hard work achieving deep and durable conceptual change and clinically important behavioural change with Explain Pain – it takes time, rebuffs are common, health practitioners rarely have teaching experience and consequently much ‘Explain Pain Light’ is carried out in the world.

One of the key skills when Explaining Pain is to identify the essential curriculum Target Concepts appropriate for an educational intervention for a specific person or group. An example of a frequently used Target Concept may be: Pain relies on context. Once the learner understands the concept, with some help, it can open up a vast store of functional knowledge, for example an understanding of why it hurts more in environments perceived to be dangerous.

Lorimer Moseley and I have extracted ten key Target Concepts for the upcoming Explain Pain Supercharged (Moseley & Butler 2017). In a group setting, where time allows us to dive deep into pain biology, we would use all ten of the Target Concepts to construct a detailed curriculum. Similarly, a curriculum for an individual with a long standing and complex pain state would also cover all ten. But a shorter intervention for an individual with a less complex pain state, or for a group presentation with the goal of giving the participants just a taste of Explain Pain, would see fewer Target Concepts addressed, perhaps with some merging occurring too.

Here they are…

We think this list of Target Concepts is quite novel, and represents the first time they have been extracted, explained and made ready for inclusion in a comprehensive Explain Pain curriculum. And we think that if nothing else, considering these Target Concepts in every Explain Pain educational intervention will help to improve outcomes – in the clinic and the research lab.

What do you think? Have we covered everything? Would you word them differently? Thoughts and comments welcome below

– David Butler

Explain Pain Supercharged – an update

Explain Pain Supercharged, from Lorimer Moseley and David Butler, is full of brand new content and will Supercharge your Explain Pain interventions in two essential ways:

Over the years, you’ve asked for it, and we’ve delivered – we’ve gone deep on the neuroimmune biology of pain with comprehensive sections detailing the latest from pain science research and its application to the clinic For the first time, educational science, conceptual change theory, metaphor use and curriculum development has been brought together specifically for health professionals delivering Explain Pain. 71 Neuroscience Nuggets, 15 Novellas and 4 comprehensive, targeted Explain Pain curricula have been provided, along with the framework to implement them into any treatment program

Explain Pain Supercharged is at the printers and we’re expecting the truck any day – we’ll let you know as soon as sales go live.

Read the book, see the show live!

It’s not just the new book that has been supercharged, our Explain Pain courses have been updated (again) to capture the new content. Our 2017 Australian tour is going great guns with Melbourne already sold out and other courses filling fast. Don’t miss out – get your registration forms back to us now.

Melbourne, 31 March – 2 April EP + GMI SOLD OUT

Adelaide, 26-28 May EP + GMI

Wollongong, 14-16 July EP + GMI

Darwin, 4-6 August EP + GMI

Brisbane, 25-27 August EP + GMI

Newcastle, 8-10 September EP + GMI