When I was in graduate school I was lucky enough to have a few great mentors who pushed me into the direction of pain science and the psychosocial approach (Thanks Mark Butler and Steph Muth). I’ve learned a ton from people like Lorimer Mosely, David Butler and Adriaan Louw and have worked hard to try and incorporate their methodologies into my own practice.
As you know, I’m also a big fan of a traditional bio-mechanical approach. I think the two fit together very nicely and forms a very solid foundation for explaining pain to patients and helping them to rehabilitate.
For some reason the psychosocial approach seems to many only applicable to chronic pain folk while the bio-mechanical approach is the go to for athletes in pain. I honestly think the two fit together beautifully and have a ton of application to all populations.
An excellent student of ours named Zach Taillie recently asked me to be on his podcast to discuss this very topic. How do we apply a psychosocial approach to athletes? What does this look like? When can we apply it? How can it help to enrich the patient’s experience and rehab process? Click the link below for the podcast:
How to Work Pain Science Into Treatment for Athletes
Give it a listen and let me know how you’ve incorporated some of this into your clinical practice. If you enjoyed it please make sure you subscribe to Zach’s podcast on iTunes as well as rate and review. Zach’s got some other great podcasts from my co-workers Mike Reinold, Mike Scaduto and Dave Tilley you should check out.
Talk soon,
Dan Pope DPT, OCS, CSCS, CF L1