Pain Science Taiwan is your source for the latest information about treating and understanding pain. Here you can find scientific articles, personal stories, studies, videos and podcasts that can help you or your clients out of pain.

We are advocates for an evidence-based approach, where pain biology education, movement, and an individualized plan is the recipe to obtain a pain-free life.

Here at Pain Science Taiwan, we endorse a paradigm shift towards embracing the biopsychosocial model for pain and question, among other things, the following:

• We now know that all pain is biopsychosocial – why do we focus primarily on the biological part of pain when providing treatment?
• When we now know that certain therapies have no, only temporary or even negative effect – why do we continue to use them?
• Studies show that how pain and understanding of both treated patients and patients are an important component of the success of pain rehabilitation – why is the understanding of pain so rarely prioritized?

For more than 350 years, pain has been understood as the direct result of tissue damage or pathology. Today, many view the body as a car that slowly breaks down and must be repaired. These changes which happen with time are understood as the cause of many pain conditions. But this understanding does not explain why the same conditions that are blamed as the culprit for pain is also evident in people without pain and still there after pain is gone. This view is also very far from how we work as a human beings. If you get a scratch on your car, you cannot just put the car in the garage for 14 days and the scratch is gone. Conversely, if we fall and hurt our knee, it is healed 14 days later because we are a living organism that heals and adapts. Therefore, it is misleading to consider the human body as a car, and perhaps instead of talking about how the body “wear and tear” we should explain the body’s adaptability as “wear and repair”.

Most people think that injury is the cause of pain and pain that occurs when we have an injury but the pain is always a complex phenomenon with bio, psycho and social contributors. All pain is complex also the pain that seems simple and easy to understand. Even in situations where we get injured and experience pain there is much more going on than what meets the eye. Professor Lorimer Moseley is known for saying:

”The biology of pain is never really straightforward, even when it appears to be.”

Of course, it is true that there is a strong relationship between injury and the experience of pain and that many painful experiences occur due to an injury, but an injury is not the only reason why we experience pain. For example, take phantom limb pain where a person experience pain in a body part they do not have such as an amputee arm or leg. Where is the injury in a body part that doesn’t exist? Another example could be something like persistent (chronic) pain where a person may have pain despite no identifiable injury. Also, most of us have also tried to discover a bruise we are unable to explain how we got or been cut by a piece paper, a “paper cut” that caused significant pain despite the injury is minimal. Pain is a not a reliable indicator of the state of the tissues nor the size of an injury.

Today, all pain is understood as biopsychosocial, which means that any painful experience, including the acute injuries like twisting the ankle, has components that contribute to the pain experience from the biological, psychological and social domains. It is important to emphasize that all pain is real regardless of the contributing sources to the pain experience. Pain is pain and one cannot contest a person’s experience of pain. However, you can try to uncover why someone may be experiencing pain, which also dictates how to address and treat the pain. If you treat all pain as if the “cause” was an injury you would not be helping a lot of people in pain which may explain why up to ¼ of the world’s population live with persistent pain.

We view and understand the human and the body as an ecosystem, where many different factors play into our well-being, life and pain experiences. Each ecosystem is unique and so is how it adapts and reacts to the stresses of life. Imagine you have a cup and if this cup is filled with water you experience pain. The water is a metaphor for threat which can come from in the form of a bad night sleep and increase in immune activity (biological) or depression and the belief that your body is weak and fragile (psychological) or being unhappy about your working environment and fighting with your friend or spouse (social). If the water overflows with water you experience pain somewhere in your body. This metaphor helps us develop a nuanced view of why we can have pain despite the fact that there is no injury.

This understanding also opens up new possibilities for treating pain both the long-term character and phantom pain. A good place to start is to learn more about pain as your understanding of pain also dictates how you try to get rid of them.

We specialize in the educating health care professionals and patients about pain and treatment of persistent (chronic) pain. Unfortunately, many with persistent and “invisible” pain experience stigma and are met with distrust the health care system and sometimes also from close relationships. These circumstances want pain management to cope with.

Our suggestion to the way out of pain involves:

• A therapist who understands your pain and are able to teach you about pain
• A treatment where you as a client are active participant
• A treatment that aims to make you independent and independent

We train and encourage professionals to:

• Understand pain from a biological, psychological and social perspective
• Have strong communicative skills and enhance placebo while avoiding nocebo
• Have tools to provide safe, confident and competent treatment

In addition to this site’s resources, you can also find additional information, interesting articles and videos on our Facebook page, where you also have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in debates.

Looking for a health care professional who uses modern pain science in their work you can find your practitioner here.

If you work with clients who have pain and want to educate yourself and optimize your treatment outcomes as well as become part of an exclusive and interactive online treatment community with access to a lot of resources, you can find the next course dates here.

If you have any criticism, praise or questions, please contact us at info@smertevidenskab.dk