Wo! this is going faster than I ever imagined. First up thanks to those of you who have signed up to ‘follow’ and an even bigger thanks to those of you who have posted such amazing comments.
I really wasn’t ready for this to go ‘out there’ but Adam Bjerre from Denmark found ‘me’ and left a message on the soma simple website… and off it went… I’ve thanked Adam very much but had to quickly re-tweak a few pages and realised I hadn’t quite included everyone in my story bit… particularly Ian Stevens from Dunblane and two very special American friends Bernie and Ellen Guth. I’m also struggling a bit with sorting the ‘blog’ page and all the ‘reply’ stuff… I’m getting a hand with that from time to time and trying to be a patient patient. Bloody widgets and side bars…..
Anyway, next up the 3 part series I did for the Organisation of Chartered Physiotherapists in Private Practice(now called ‘Physio First) journal: ‘In Touch’. The articles are a bit of my 2001-2003 spin on biopsychosocial/multidimensional thinking and an introduction to the ‘Shopping Basket Approach’ – The way I think and reason with patients given all the evidence base meshed with my own thoughts with regards biomedicine, healing and recovery, pain mechanisms, disability, function, impairments, fitness and the the various ways of thinking about and dealing with pain. Part 3 gives a patient example which may help!
I’ll also put up the clinical reasoning article I did with Dave Butler and a lengthy complex pain case history that was published in Mark Jones’ book ‘Clinical Reasoning for Manual therapists…. so you can see where I came from and where I ended up. When you read the case history note how Mark Jones keeps asking and harping on about bloody abdominal muscles! I love Mark to bits but he did seem to think I’d missed something with this lady… Anyway see what you think…
While on abdominal muscles, don’t forget their main function before we all went and sat down in front of computers and moved around in cars… – breathing! Panting! Shouting… Not…. tensing to pick a pen up from the floor, or doing sit-ups – unless you’re like me and have to get out of bed to have a pee 5 or more times a night….
Hope you enjoy and I really appreciate everyone who’s joined in… and made such encouraging comments..
Louis
louisgiffordachesandpains 
I feel this is one of the most important info for me. And
i’m happy studying your article. However should commentary on
some basic things, The website style is wonderful, the articles is actually excellent :
D. Just right activity, cheers
Healthy sceptism about predominently anatomical/biomechanical models of assessment/treatment lead me to your writing in the early 2000s and eventually attending your ‘aches and pains’ course in Tamworth 2004. Despite many influences (mainly signposted to by the somasimple crowd) it is you I credit for allowing me to see the much bigger picture in terms of pain, and that the mature organism model/neuromatrix should be applied with all patients in pain, regardless of time scales. Even though I have seen increased awareness of pain physiology over the years, it is still an approach that seems to be half-heartedly trotted out for those patients who have failed to respond to the obligatory correcting of ‘imbalances’ and pressing of sore spots.
I hope that your online presence will reach as many people as possible to help shape our profession for the future.
I would be interested in your thoughts about how you, if indeed you did, integrate manual therapy into your explanatory model/treatment? It is my experience that no matter how little percentage of your treatment time is passive treatment, then this is what the patients’ view of their treatment becomes. Explanations seem to become secondary to the “manipulation” you perform..
Thanks are not enough.
David Collis
Louis,
This a wealth of extremely valuable information. Thanks for making it freely available! I had to laugh about your exchange with Mark Jones concerning abdominal muscle function in your chronic pain case report. It would be interesting to get your thoughts on the specific muscle dysfunction meme that continue to pervade the rehabilitation of musculoskeletal disorders. A good example of this is found here http://bit.ly/19bhIrj
Bill