The beginning of a brand new 12 months nearly all the time brings reflections on the final 12 months. I typically affirm what issues to me and take into consideration how nicely I’m residing my values. I don’t know what this 12 months will deliver, and neither does anybody else. What I can do is ready some intentions. So right here goes.
Somebody stated running a blog is lifeless. That it’s not a factor any extra. I disagree – the type of running a blog has modified, however any time we’re posting on social media (ie create, share, and trade content material (textual content, pictures, movies) and kind digital communities) we’re ‘running a blog’ in my guide!
And there’s NO scarcity of on-line social content material. A lot of it’s AI (pure or tweaked) for positive, however content material availability hasn’t modified.
Readership has dropped slightly (loads particularly from the early days of 2007 after I first began!), however I nonetheless get an everyday quantity subscribing and dropping in. I’ve by no means tweaked for search engine optimisation, so readership is natural. I’ve by no means charged for my content material, by no means monetized it, have by no means had sponsorship or product placement, and I’ve continued to permit feedback. I intend to proceed this.
So why am I doing it? What’s it for?
Writing provides me house to assume. It’s a type of reflective journaling. Writing permits me to get ideas out – and to share them with whoever fancies studying them.
This weblog paperwork almost 20 years of enthusiastic about ache. A report of how I’ve contemplated and tussled with ache and ache administration, and what we do to assist individuals who reside with ache.
My weblog is biased. I’m comfortable to declare my biases:
- Ache self-management (issues folks can do for themselves, quite than counting on another person to Do The Factor) as a result of not having to think about your self as ‘a affected person’ is fairly liberating. Even when it’s important to Do The Issues your self (and it’s HARD!).
- Lowering misery and incapacitythe impression of ache on folks’s lives whereas remembering that it’s THEIR life, not mine.
- Honouring that folks residing with ache have their very own livesand what works for me (or what ‘the proof’ says) might not match an particular person. As a result of evidence-based healthcare has all the time included three elements: (1) analysis proof; (2) clinician’s expertise; and (3) the person’s preferences, values and priorities.
- Admitting uncertainty, restricted effectiveness, and incomplete information. Not promising what can’t be delivered. Being actual about how poorly therapies for persisting ache work. It’s heartbreaking to listen to folks with ache describe the peaks and troughs of hope and despair as they’re inveigled into The New & Shiny Subsequent Factor, solely to seek out out it didn’t do what it promised. AND it value – time, effort, hopes, different stuff you which can be essential, like relationships.
- Understanding that ache is an expertise, and experiences are multifactorial. That neurocentricism together with neuroinflammation and cortical illustration and all of the ‘nociceptive equipment’ understanding we’ve got is incompleteparticularly if it fails to incorporate intra- and inter- particular person ranges of research, and much more particularly if it doesn’t contemplate programs, contextual constraints and sophisticated emergent properties. Single issue ’causes’ (like ‘trauma’, or ‘genetics’, or ‘biomechanics’ yada yada) don’t supply explanations for all of the myriad methods folks expertise and cope with ache.
- Pondering critically about analysisrealizing that there is no such thing as a such factor as bias-free, and valuing qualitative analysis as extremely as quantitative analysis as a result of these methodologies reply completely different questions. One way or the other the questions I ponder have a qualitative angle to them…
- Avoiding ‘manufacturers’ and novelty as a result of analysis is about collected data woven into coherent fashions which can be, as I stated above, unsure and incomplete. Dogmatism doesn’t have a spot within the ache house IMHO. I could be dogmatic about that! At the very least for now.
- Questioning issues is sweet – however the ‘so what’ and ‘how does this apply to observe/life’ are additionally essential. Questioning with out acknowledging the nuance, the great AND not so good, the context the place concepts are used, the function of an concept or strategy and what it achieves in observe – not so useful in my guide.
So why do I write? To scratch my itch to get issues off my chest. To assume and assemble understanding. To be biased in direction of issues that usually aren’t favoured (like methods to reside alongside ache). To go away a legacy of my musings on ache, primarily based on my studying of the analysis, on my private expertise, on scientific observe, on suggestions from others who reside with ache, and from these clinicians working on this messy house. To share data freely and respectfully. To ask awkward questions and attempt to reply them. And above all, to be sincere and genuine concerning the depraved drawback of ache in our communities.
We should not have options that work for all. And it’s unlikely we’ll see common options regardless of the guarantees of ‘it’s almost right here!’ (Oh HOW I’m over listening to this my whole 30-something 12 months profession!). Within the meantime, there are individuals who might be helped even slightly with what we DO know helps just a bit. So my weblog can be about spreading this round so folks with ache get provided the entire vary of choices, and never simply the most recent shiny factor or ‘nevertheless it’s on its means’.
I hope you’ll be part of me now and again. I’ll nonetheless be writing after I fancy and on what I fancy writing about. And it is going to be biased as a result of people are – and I’m declaring my biases FWIW.