scholarly journals Pain and the field of affordances: an enactive approach to acute and chronic pain

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Coninx ◽  
Peter Stilwell
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Pain Therapy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Behavioral Learning ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Pain Chronification

AbstractIn recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper conceptualizes differences between acute and chronic pain, as well as the dynamic process of pain chronification, in terms of changes in the field of affordances. This is, in terms of the possibilities for action perceived by subjects in pain. As such, we aim to do justice to the lived experience of patients as well as the dynamic role of behavioral learning, neural reorganization, and socio-cultural practices in the generation and maintenance of pain. Second, we aim to show in which manners such an enactive approach may contribute to a comprehensive understanding of pain that avoids conceptual and methodological issues of reductionist and fragmented approaches. It proves particularly beneficial as a heuristic in pain therapy addressing the heterogenous yet dynamically intertwined aspects that may contribute to pain and its chronification.

Catastrophizing in Comorbid Chronic Pain and Mental Illness

2020 ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Cynthia O. Townsend ◽  
Donald R. Townsend
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Prognostic Factor ◽  
Pain Catastrophizing ◽  
Psychological Interventions ◽  
Clinical Implications ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Pain Chronification

Catastrophizing, or the tendency to emphasize and exaggerate the occurrence of negative consequences in a specific situation, has been shown to play an important role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Dynamically viewed as a contributor, mediator, and result of chronic pain suffering, catastrophizing has notable importance for clinicians treating patients’ comorbid chronic pain and mental illness. Exciting research on catastrophizing and neuroplasticity in persons with chronic pain promises to expand our understanding of pain catastrophizing, pain chronification, and cortical structural neuroplasticity in response to psychological interventions. This chapter provides a selective review of the assessment and neural correlates of pain catastrophizing as well as the role of catastrophizing as a prognostic factor for pain-related outcomes. The interactions between catastrophizing and chronic pain are also explored in the context of key comorbid mental conditions: depression and insomnia. Clinical implications for the practicing clinician are discussed.

scholarly journals The Role of Stress Regulation on Neural Plasticity in Pain Chronification

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyun Li ◽  
Li Hu
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Animal Models ◽  
Neural Plasticity ◽  
Clinical Symptoms ◽  
Brain Plasticity ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Stress Regulation ◽  
Pain Chronification ◽  
A Chain

Pain, especially chronic pain, is one of the most common clinical symptoms and has been considered as a worldwide healthcare problem. The transition from acute to chronic pain is accompanied by a chain of alterations in physiology, pathology, and psychology. Increasing clinical studies and complementary animal models have elucidated effects of stress regulation on the pain chronification via investigating activations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and changes in some crucial brain regions, including the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. Although individuals suffer from acute pain benefit from such physiological alterations, chronic pain is commonly associated with maladaptive responses, like the HPA dysfunction and abnormal brain plasticity. However, the causal relationship among pain chronification, stress regulation, and brain alterations is rarely discussed. To call for more attention on this issue, we review recent findings obtained from clinical populations and animal models, propose an integrated stress model of pain chronification based on the existing models in perspectives of environmental influences and genetic predispositions, and discuss the significance of investigating the role of stress regulation on brain alteration in pain chronification for various clinical applications.

scholarly journals Reorganization of hippocampal functional connectivity with transition to chronic back pain

2014 ◽  
Vol 111 (5) ◽  
pp. 1065-1076 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia A. Mutso ◽  
Bogdan Petre ◽  
Lejian Huang ◽  
Marwan N. Baliki ◽  
Souraya Torbey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Neuropathic Pain ◽  
Back Pain ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Chronic Back Pain ◽  
Rodent Models ◽  
Attention Task ◽  
Pain Chronification

The hippocampus has been shown to undergo significant changes in rodent models of neuropathic pain; however, the role of the hippocampus in human chronic pain and its contribution to pain chronification have remained unexplored. Here we examine hippocampal processing during a simple visual attention task. We used functional MRI to identify intrinsic and extrinsic hippocampal functional connectivity (synchronous neural activity), comparing subacute back pain (SBP, back pain 1–4 mo) and chronic back pain (CBP, back pain >10 yr) patients to control (CON) subjects. Both groups showed more extensive hippocampal connectivity than CON subjects. We then examined the evolution of hippocampal connectivity longitudinally in SBP patients who recovered (SBPr, back pain decreased >20% in 1 yr) and those with persistent pain (SBPp). We found that SBPp and SBPr subjects have distinct changes in hippocampal-cortical connectivity over 1 yr; specifically, SBPp subjects showed large decreases in hippocampal connectivity with medial prefrontal cortex (HG-mPFC). Furthermore, in SBP patients the strength of HG-mPFC reflected variations in back pain over the year. These relationships were replicated when examined in a different task performed by SBP patients (rating fluctuations of back pain), indicating that functional connectivity of the hippocampus changes robustly in subacute pain and the nature of these changes depends on whether or not patients recover from SBP. The observed reorganization of processing within the hippocampus and between the hippocampus and the cortex seems to contribute to the transition from subacute to chronic pain and may also underlie learning and emotional abnormalities associated with chronic pain.

scholarly journals Mad Insight

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-63
Author(s):  
Renee Dumaresque
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Thomas King ◽  
Vulvar Pain ◽  
Pain Drawing ◽  
Dominant Discourses

This poem is informed by the relationships between gender, race, chronic pain, hysteria, and the role of dominant discourses in shaping interpretations of bodily and psychic pain. Drawing on my lived experience as a non-binary person with chronic vulvar pain, or vulvodynia, I challenge the psychiatrization of chronic pain and propose hysteria as a potential state of resistance and refusal (Dumaresque, 2019). I weave fog throughout this poem as a metaphor that captures pain, madness, and perception. Fog symbolizes disruption and disorientation; yet, fog also gestures to the potentiality of being displaced from normative insight (Bruce, 2017).  I engage William Connolly’s (2010) reading of perception as formed through discipline to think through the silent but subversive waves of knowledge and power that carve the lenses through which we story ourselves and others (Erickson, 2016).  As Thomas King (2003) writes, “the truth about stories is that’s all we are” (p. 32). This poem is situated in a reading of madness and hysteria as sites of affective protest (Dumaresque, 2019). I ask, what can be resourced from our becoming un-hinged? This poem contributes to mad knowledge that is intersectional and in-service to disrupting medical and psychiatric violence, whiteness, hetero/cis-governance, and “compulsory able-bodymindedness” (Sheppard, 2018, p. 59).

Enhancing Pain Self-Management via Internet-Based Technology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Ruehlman ◽  
Marian Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Partial Solution ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Face Pain

This chapter focuses on internet-based pain self-management (IPSM) training for adults with chronic pain. Due to space limitations, it does not address programs directed toward children or adolescents or the burgeoning research on mobile technologies. The chapter discusses various definitions of self-management (SM) and proposes an organizing framework for the concept of SM. It examines barriers to traditional face-to-face pain SM training and the role of Internet-based training as a partial solution to the lack of care options for many. It does not reiterate the numerous excellent reviews of the efficacy of online pain SM programs. Those reviews provide support for the continued development and testing of such programs. The chapter’s focus is on the identification of strengths and weaknesses of extant technologies with an eye toward future improvements. The review of 27 IPSM programs reveals a number of important substantive and methodological issues.

Abstraction

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maaike Bleeker ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Real ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Sensorimotor Skills ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dance And Technology

This text elaborates an understanding of abstraction as fundamental to how we think from a closer look at relationships between abstraction, movement, materiality and lived experience. Starting from Whitehead-inspired reflections on ab­straction by Alberto Toscano and Brian Massumi, the differences between their respective readings of his work are shown to be indicative for their different conceptions of the relationships between abstraction, the concrete, and lived experience. The text then continues to elaborate how Alva Noë’s enactive approach to perception illumi­nates the central role of movement and sensorimotor skills in the emergence of abstractions from the continuity of process that is reality, and could contribute to further understanding of the relationship between movement and abstraction as what Massumi describes as the incorporeal dimension of the real. Finally, this text reflects on the potential of movement practices (including dance) and technology to become part of how abstraction is achieved.

Role of Ethnicity on Pain Perception, Fatigue, and Quality of Life in a Pediatric Chronic Pain Population

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey I. Gold ◽  
Trina Haselrig ◽  
D. Colette Nicolaou ◽  
Katharine A. Belmont
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Pain Perception ◽  
Pediatric Chronic Pain

Alignment

2016 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Pier Giuseppe Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Strategic Role ◽  
Education Today ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The Subject

The subject of alignment is not new to the world of education. Today however, it has come to mean different things and to have a heuristic value in education according to research in different areas, not least for neuroscience, and to attention to skills and to the alternation framework.This paper, after looking at the classic references that already attributed an important role to alignment in education processes, looks at the strategic role of alignment in the current context, outlining the shared construction processes and focusing on some of the ways in which this is put into effect.Alignment is part of a participatory, enactive approach that gives a central role to the interaction between teaching and learning, avoiding the limits of behaviourism, which has a greater bias towards teaching, and cognitivism/constructivism, which focus their attention on learning and in any case, on that which separates a teacher preparing the environment and a student working in it.

Pembinaan Semula Peradaban Komuniti Cina Muslim Berasaskan Dialog Antara Agama: Pengalaman di Terengganu dan Brunei

Sains Insani ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-84
Author(s):  
Azarudin Awang ◽  
Azman Che Mat ◽  
Sophian Ramli
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Interfaith Dialogue ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Muslim Family

Bagi sesebuah negara yang mempunyai etnik pelbagai anutan kepercayaan dan perbezaan amalan budaya, dialog antara agama berperanan membetulkan semula kekaburan dalam kehidupan beragama dan berbudaya. Melalui peranan Saudara Baru, dialog antara agama mampu menjadi medan bagi menjelaskan kebenaran tentang agama Islam kepada masyarakat bukan Muslim dan pelaksanaan amalan budaya asal kepada Muslim asal. Objektif kajian ini ialah melihat pengalaman pelaksanaan dialog antara agama di Terengganu dan relevansi dalam kehidupan beragama di negara Brunei. Metode kajian ini menggunakan kajian dokumen yang menyentuh komuniti Cina Muslim di Terengganu dan Brunei. Pengalaman pelaksanaan dialog antara agama di Terengganu dan negara Brunei memperlihatkan dialog antara agama mampu membetulkan salah faham dan selanjutnya mengendurkan ketegangan hubungan antara agama dan budaya antara komuniti Saudara Baru, ahli keluarga bukan Muslim dan masyarakat Muslim asal. Biarpun begitu, adalah dicadangkan agar kajian yang menyentuh dialog antara agama perlu diperkukuhkan sebagai medium membina semula peradaban memandangkan penduduk di kedua-dua lokasi ini terdiri daripada berbilang etnik dan agama sedangkan pada masa yang sama masalah yang menyentuh hubungan antara agama sentiasa timbul. Abstract: For a country with diverse ethics of beliefs and cultural practices, interfaith dialogue plays a role to redefine ambiguity in religious and cultural life. Through the role of the New Muslim (Muslim Convert), interfaith dialogue can become a medium to explain the truth about Islam to the non-Muslims and the implementation of real cultural practices to the others Muslim. The objective of this study is to examine the experience of interfaith dialogue in Terengganu and in Brunei. The method of this study is being conducted in document research that related with the Muslim Chinese community in Terengganu and Brunei. In addition, interviews with people involved in the management of New Muslims also carried out. The experience of interfaith dialogue in Terengganu and Brunei shows that dialogue capable explains misunderstandings and further loosening the tension between religion and culture among New Muslims, non-Muslim family members and Muslim communities. However, it is recommended that studies on interfaith dialogue should be strengthened as a medium for rebuilding civilization as the residents of both locations are multi-ethnic and religious while at the same time the problem of interreligious persists.

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