How philosophy can change the understanding of pain
A German-Canadian research team is calling for a more comprehensive approach
2021-04-23
(Press-News.org) Dr. Sabrina Coninx from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Dr. Peter Stilwell from McGill University, Canada, have investigated how philosophical approaches can be used to think in new ways about pain and its management. The researchers advocate not merely reducing chronic pain management to searching and treating underlying physical changes but instead adopting an approach that focuses on the person as a whole. Their work was published online in the journal "Synthese" on 15 April 2021.
It is not currently possible to treat chronic pain effectively in many cases. This has encouraged researchers from various disciplines to consider new approaches to pain and its management over recent years. "Pain research and clinical practice do not take place in a vacuum, but instead involve implicit assumptions regarding what pain is and how it can be treated," says Sabrina Coninx, research assistant at the Bochum research training group Situated Cognition. "Our aim is to shed light on these assumptions and discover how we can think in new ways about pain and its management with the help of philosophical approaches." In their work, the authors develop a holistic, integrative and action-oriented approach.
Viewing patients as a whole
In specific terms, they suggest three things: firstly, addressing pain should involve more than just looking for and treating underlying physiological changes. A holistic approach places the focus on patients as a whole and creates space for their experiences, concerns, expectations and narratives. The influence of socio-cultural practices in the generation of chronic pain should also be taken into account. For example, pain patients are often initially encouraged to protect themselves from injury and avoid activity, which may be helpful in the beginning but can contribute to chronification in the long run.
Secondly, according to the researchers, chronic pain should be understood as a dynamic process in which many different factors interact in a non-linear way. The initial cause of pain, for instance, is not necessarily the cause of its chronification and also does not need to be the most crucial factor in treatment. The complex interaction of subjective experience, expectations, learned behavioural patterns, neural reorganisation, stigmatisation and other factors therefore needs to be considered.
Focus on action possibilities
Thirdly, according to Coninx and Stilwell, patients should be encouraged to interact with their environment and identify possibilities for action. This is based on the assumption that chronic pain fundamentally changes the way in which patients perceive themselves and their relationship with their environment. Pain treatment could therefore involve helping the patient to increasingly notice positively associated and personally meaningful options for action and view themselves as capable of taking action again. There is then less focus on the body as an obstacle, and instead the patients pay more attention to how they can overcome limitations.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-04-23
A team led by Prof. GUO Guangcan and Prof. ZOU Changling from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized efficient frequency conversion in microresonators via a degenerate sum-frequency process, and achieved cross-band frequency conversion and amplification of converted signal through observing the cascaded nonlinear optical effects inside the microresonator. The study was published in Physics Review Letters.
Coherent frequency conversion process has wide application in classical and quantum information fields such as communication, detection, ...
2021-04-23
A new study conducted jointly by the University of Liege (Belgium) and the Ecole normale superieure - PSL (France) shows that heart brain interactions, measured using electroencephalography (EEG), provide a novel diagnostic avenue for patients with disorders of consciousness. This study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Catherine Tallon-Baudry (ENS, CNRS) introduces : "The scientific community already knew that in healthy participants, the brain's response to heartbeats is related to perceptual, bodily and self-consciousness. We now show that we can obtain clinically meaningful information if we probe this interaction in ...
2021-04-23
Networks offer a powerful way to visualize and analyze complex systems. However, depending on the size and complexity of the network, many visualizations are limited. Protein interactions in the human body constitute such a complex system that can hardly be visualized. Jörg Menche, Adjunct Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the University of Vienna and research group leader at Max Perutz Labs (Uni Wien/MedUni), and his team developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) platform that solves ...
2021-04-23
Software using artificial intelligence, AI, is revolutionizing how microscopy images are analysed. For instance, AI can be used to detect features in images (i.e., tumours in biopsy samples) or improve the quality of images by removing unwanted noise. However, non-experts continue to find AI technologies difficult to use.
In the article "Democratising deep learning for microscopy with ZeroCostDL4Mic", published in Nature Communications on 15 April 2021, researchers describe a platform called ZeroCostDL4Mic, which makes these AI technologies accessible to everyone.
"The key novelty is that ZeroCostDL4Mic runs in the cloud for free and does not ...
2021-04-23
In the brain, more than a hundred molecular substances act as transmitters that control communication pathways between nerve cells via thousands of different receptor types. In a review article, an international research team discusses how the activation of certain nerve cell receptors affects neuronal networks in the brain. The authors from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and Oxford University present concepts to quantify receptor-specific modulations of brain states. They have also developed a computer model that can predict the impact of individual receptor types on brain activity.
In addition, the researchers show how the predictions obtained in the computer can be verified and refined by experimental methods. They hope this will lead to new ...
2021-04-23
A group of University of Wyoming professors and students has identified an unusual belt of igneous rocks that stretches for over 2,000 miles from British Columbia, Canada, to Sonora, Mexico.
The rock belt runs through Idaho, Montana, Nevada, southeast California and Arizona.
"Geoscientists usually associate long belts of igneous rocks with chains of volcanoes at subduction zones, like Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer," says Jay Chapman, an assistant professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics. "What makes this finding so interesting and mysterious is that this belt ...
2021-04-23
NEW YORK, NY--A new imaging technique developed by scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital captures movies of receptors on the surface of living cells in unprecedented detail and could pave the way to a trove of new drugs.
The researchers used the technique to zoom in on individual receptor proteins on the surface of living cells to determine if the receptors work solo or come together to work as pairs. This work appeared in the April issue of Nature Methods.
"If two different receptors come together to form a dimer with distinctive function and pharmacology, this might allow for a new generation of drugs with greater specificity and reduced side effects," says Jonathan ...
2021-04-23
Sophia Antipolis - 23 April 2021: A study of 2.4 million hospitalised cannabis users has found that those with an arrhythmia were 4.5 times more likely to die while in hospital than those without. The research is presented at EHRA 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1
"People should be aware of this devastating outcome and be careful when using cannabis if they have a concomitant heart problem," said study author Dr. Sittinun Thangjui of Bassett Healthcare Network, Cooperstown, US.
Marijuana or cannabis is the most commonly used psychoactive substance worldwide.2 However, there is limited knowledge about safety of the drug in people with cardiac arrhythmias. This study examined the burden ...
2021-04-23
Osaka, Japan - Scientists at Osaka University, in cooperation with JOANNEUM RESEARCH (Weiz, Austria), introduced wireless health monitoring patches that use embedded piezoelectric nanogenerators to power themselves with harvested biomechanical energy. This work may lead to new autonomous health sensors as well as battery-less wearable electronic devices.
As wearable technology and smart sensors become increasingly popular, the problem of providing power to all of these devices become more relevant. While the energy requirements of each component may be modest, the need for wires or even batteries become burdensome and inconvenient. That is why new energy harvesting methods are needed. Also, the ability ...
2021-04-23
Among the first lessons any grade school science student learns is that white light is not white at all, but rather a composite of many photons, those little droplets of energy that make up light, from every color of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Now, researchers at Stanford University have developed an optical device that allows engineers to change and fine-tune the frequencies of each individual photon in a stream of light to virtually any mixture of colors they want. The result, published April 23 in Nature Communication, is a new photonic architecture that could transform fields ranging from digital communications and artificial intelligence to cutting-edge quantum computing.
"This powerful new tool puts a degree of control in the engineer's ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] How philosophy can change the understanding of pain
A German-Canadian research team is calling for a more comprehensive approach
