Pain Neuroscience Education: Teaching People About Pain

by Adriaan Louw

Evidence shows that patients who better understand their pain and what pain truly is experience less pain, have less fear, move better, exercise more and can regain hope.
This physical therapy textbook explains how to teach your patients about pain and how to integrate pain neuroscience education into your practice. Written by clinicians for clinicians, the revised second edition of this physical therapy book contains significant updates and new content presented in a way that is relevant and readily applicable to real-world clinical settings.
The authors deliver an evidence-based perspective on how the body and brain work together to create pain, teach how to convey this new view of pain to patients in a way that’s easily understood and internalized, and demonstrate how to successfully integrate pain neuroscience education into a practice.
Covered in this neuroscience book are topics such This neuroscience textbook and clinical guide is not only the perfect way to introduce students to the evidence base and application of pain neuroscience education, but also helps clinicians productively treat chronic pain instead of just managing it.
Published 2023-01-27

536 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Haley B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally LOVED this book: learning about something I wanted to know more about was really fun. I think all rehab professionals should read this book; it’s practical, evidence based, and well-written.:)

[Michael Cohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw a PT who uses a pain neuroscience education approach and she infuriated me with her condescending, pat, grade-school level explanations of nervous system sensitization. Then I read this book and was convinced that they were pretty much right on. Full of great information about how pain and damage are not the same thing, but pain can't be ignored either. It's a process of gradually reeducating your nervous system about what your body's real limits are, and it can't be rushed.

At the same time I got the impression that authors really don't believe in the risk of re-injury, or in people who have actual ongoing tissue problems that can't be fixed just by addressing pain. This is a grievous oversight because it's hard to imagine someone recovering from a torn ACL or a ruptured spinal disc NOT wanting to know "okay, if pain doesn't automatically mean I'm hurting myself, how DO I know I'm hurting myself?" Also, people whose pain arises from ongoing trauma or from a complex and ongoing disorder like, say, Ehlers-Danlos, will find themselves very badly served -- and horribly condescended to -- by a PNE approach.

Still, I learned a ton from this book and in my personal case, a PNE approach did help me get back to exercise after years of worrying about reinjury and feeling like my back was just permanently "touchy." If you have pain that's preventing you from doing the activities you want to do, you probably don't want to read this book -- you want to read "Why do I hurt" or one of the other briefer, more focused books targeted at laypeople. But if you're the kind of person who's fascinated by what your body is doing, or if you've read the lay-focused books and it sounded like superficial folderol, this is the textbook for you.

[Kelsey Barklund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes to self:
Three things that can change pain volume
Stress and anxiety
Mood
Attention

Ask people what their pain recipe is, then figure out low pain day recipe can be.

Hyperbole and a half pain scale.

[Jillybb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff. Simply presented.