Got persistent or ‘nociplastic’ pain?
Sufferers and researchers attest that nociplastic pain including chronic musculoskeletal pain, fibromyalgia, chronic low back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic bladder and pelvic pain drastically affect quality of life, severely impacting social relations and the ability to work (Fitzcharles et al., 2021; Moseley, 2010). Surgical and pharmaceutical interventions have low‐quality evidence for treatment, whereas psychosocial […]
The Biopolitics of Pain: from Chronic to Persistent
Chronic pain accounts for 20% of physician visits worldwide (Treede et al., 2015). The ABC recently reporting that 3.4 million Australian people have chronic pain and are waiting between 12 months and five years for an appointment at a public pain clinic (Chen & Robinson, 2020). This has been pushed to breaking point with the recent restriction of prescribing opioids along with the coronavirus pandemic (Chen & Robinson, 2020; TGA, […]
Reframing Pain, Reframing Massage
It is a very human desire to want pain gone, and one of the agents of elimination we often turn to is a massage therapist. For acute inflammatory pain, say from an injury, it does indeed go away once the injury has healed. Further, those who are highly active and get regular delayed onset muscle […]
Releasing Trapped Emotions Part 2: Help from Somewhere
Antonio Damasio’s Protoself, as introduced in Part 1, produces feelings about the internal environment of the body. As discussed, the Protoself is like a very smart automatic car that takes care of many matters on its own. When it can’t manage the homeostasis of that internal environment it needs to communicate those feelings to other […]
Releasing Trapped Emotions Part 1: Our Three Selves
We often hear about releasing trapped emotions from the body using bodywork and yoga. Whilst we all know that we feel different after yoga, exercise or a massage, this area challenges me. I think the main difficulty comes from the language itself. We hear that emotions are stuck in the body, and we come from […]
Soma, what’s in a name?
Soma is an ancient word and used around the world, many of the meanings are relevant to what we do 1. soma (plural somas or somata) (anatomy) The whole axial portion of an animal, including the head, neck, trunk, and tail. (cytology) The bulbous part of a neuron, containing the cell nucleus. The soma and long axons of our neurons compose and recompose with other neurons in both our body […]