Stress, Pain and Recovery

Who Should Attend

• All health and medical professionals working with people who have pain
• Health and medical professional educators
• Other practitioners working with people with pain

What You Will Learn

• Topic 1 - Body’s Protection System

The Body’s Protection System is complex and integrated, comprising of neuro-immune-endocrine interactions. Key elements of this system including important cells and mediators of the stress response will be presented.

• Topic 2 – Neuro-immune-endocrine Plasticity

Plasticity and learning are key features of survival. Our life experiences, particularly early adverse events, can have a lasting impact on health and well-being. This is not only due to plasticity of neural structure and function, but also due to the plasticity in immune and endocrine function. Allostasis and allostatic loads are useful terms to describe how our physiology and behaviour react to stress. Examples will be used to illustrate this.

• Topic 3 – Stress, Pain and Recovery

The impact of stress during pain and recovery has been apparent for a long time. The role of stressors including social stress on pain and tissue healing will be discussed.

• Topic 4 – Application in Clinical Practice

Applying the psychoneuroimmunology to clinical practice may be a new concept. The Pain and Movement Reasoning Model will be briefly introduced as a tool to assist clinical reasoning. Simple and novel strategies for identifying physiological signs of stress and innovative interventions that have been shown to assist pain and recovery will be presented. This practical session will require some disrobing and some discomfort (i.e. sensory threshold or tolerance testing). While all participants are encouraged to participate, personal choices will be respected without prejudice.

Upon completion of the course, the participant should be able to:

• Describe key elements and functions of the neuro-immune-endocrine interactions that preserve the body’s homeostasis
• Explain using a psycho-neuro-immunological approach, how early life events might make someone more pain vulnerable
• Appropriately apply the concepts of stress biology to clinical examples
• Identify equipment that can be used to assess for pain sensitivity
• Describe the process for testing centrally modulated responses to discomfort

Advanced Preparation 

• View videoclip “Understanding pain in less than 5 minutes” 
• Read “Is it time to reframe how we care for people with non-traumatic musculoskeletal pain?”

Schedule

Certificate and Assessment

A Certificate of Participation will be issued to participants who:

• Attend 75% of the course
• Undertake and pass non-credit bearing assessment (during course)

Fee Structure

The full fee for this course is S$2,398.00.

Note: All fees above include GST. GST applies to individuals and Singapore-registered companies.