Pain Unstuck: A fresh perspective on pain and exercise.
Who can attend this course?
This course is open to physios, chiros, podiatrists, exercise physiologists and all other exercise rehabilitation / health professionals.
Is this course just about talking to our patients about pain?
Pain education is an important foundation of treatment. But the evidence suggests that we need to do more than just talk to our patients about pain. This course emphasises practical skills to facilitate movement experimentation, sensorimotor retraining and exercise prescription for people living with persisting pain. These practical skills are underpinned by an active inference processing framework which integrates existing skills (e.g. manual therapy, taping, dry needling, exercise rehabilitation, pain education etc). We explore where and how to deploy these existing skills within a contemporary pain science framework.
What will I learn?
Active inference flips our understanding of how the nervous system operates and provides a potential explanatory framework to guide your clinical practice.
The course takes participants on a journey to consider pain as a deeply personal, conscious experience. This means pain doesn’t live in the tissues, nor in the brain. Rather, pain sits somewhere in between, emerging from the delicate dance between sensory information and your unconscious predictions.
Using case studies of my patients, participants will learn how to help their patients understand that it is safe to move, feel that it is safe to move, experience safe movement and repeatedly move with confidence. Learning objectives include:
- Viewing pain through the lens of active inference
- Understating the evidence for exercise as a treatment for persisting pain
- Recognising the importance of structural pathology and screening for increased risk of serious pathology
- Retraining the sensorimotor system through sensory precision training, implicit and explicit pre-motor training, and feedback-enriched and goal oriented movement.
- Extending your subjective examination to incorporate the person and their wider world
- Experimenting with movement as a form of learning
- Planning a comprehensive exercise rehabilitation programme for persons with persisting pain
- Aligning existing treatments (e.g. manual therapy, taping, etc) with this predictive processing perspective of pain
5 star reviews - what participants say about this course:
"I have just done Optimise Rehab's Pain Unstuck course over the weekend and I would highly recommend it for clinicians of all levels of experience. I have done a number of Merv's courses to date and he always does a great job of presenting the research and how we can translate this into a clinical setting. Thanks again Merv."
Ciarán Ó'Seachnasaigh, Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist
"I've now done a few of OR's courses and can thoroughly recommend each of them. I've just completed the Pain Unstuck course this weekend and Merv did a brilliant job at delivering content that fused contemporary pain science with exercise rehab. Looking forward to getting on another of their courses!"
Scott Murray, Musculoskeletal and Sports & Exercise Physiotherapist and practice owner
"Oh! What a great feeling to be on course again! Especially when there is a course with a fantastically knowledgeable lecturer, who also masters the art of disseminating knowledge in a good way. There is a lot of humor, good subject matter, no shortcuts or unfounded simplifications. Delicious! The material in the course was exactly what I'd hoped for, and then some!"
Magnus Barføtt Håmsø, Manipulative Physiotherapist and Clinic Owner
Course planning
- 08:30 - 09:00: Registration with coffee and tea