Healthskills blog

How does chronic pain management work? A hypothesis to ponder

There have been increasing calls for clinicians and researchers to move away from using grouped results from randomised controlled studies because these fail to distinguish between those people who do really well and those who do not. Eminent ...

Pain management and the political

There are only a few more weeks before a general election in New Zealand. This means the usual rounds of promises, muck-racking, hoardings and defaced hoardings. As I browse the research into chronic pain, and bemoan the lack of attention to ...

Should we take their word for it? Patient-reported vs observed functional outcomes

Pain is a subjective experience. There’s no direct means to measure what it is like to be in pain. Disability, or the impact of pain on what we do in daily life is, on the other hand, able to be observed as well as reported on by people with ...