EP Supercharged – final draft

What are you reading?

I am reading the final drafts of Lorimer Moseley and my Explain Pain Supercharged. A bit self-indulgent I know!

Phew! – this has been years in the making, but it’s lovely to see it being typeset and EP Supercharged should be out early in the new year. The art is all sliding nicely next to the text and our designers are hard at work making it look beautiful. I enjoy writing with Lorimer so much – even though he can write 3 times as fast as I can and ride a bike 100km without puffing. I think Loz has produced a stunning revisionist and very novel view of the biology of pain – from the remarkable sensory dance in the tissues to the forgotten complexity of spinal cord neurotags, the new understanding of neuroimmunology and dangerous molecular patterns throughout our body plus a revision of neurotag theory. This is not only material which facilitates new therapeutic story-telling, but it underpins the process of story telling itself.

The story-telling part is more my bit. I have always liked chatting but I have also been concerned about how pain education has been simplified, misused and underused these days so I have devoted chapters to the therapeutic translation of pain stories. This primarily involves conceptual change strategies, as the big difference between pain education and most other education is that our learners in pain enter the clinic with existing knowledge and behaviours and not a blank slate. It’s been a fun write, setting up curriculums for individuals and groups, collecting a taxonomy of stories and developing transformative metaphor. What has also been exciting is the growing link between Explain Pain and the new neuroimmune biology. How metaphor theory links to our conceptualisations of neurotags, how a properly constructed curriculum is actually emergent and brain-like, the neurology of linguistics  and how the DIM SIM concept links nicely with immunological balance and danger associated molecular patterns in our bodies.

What are you drinking with it? 

I should rephrase the question and say “what have I drunk with it!” Five years of coffee, tea, shiraz and a delicate vintage port which I sip in the evening as I read Moseley’s latest dispatches and try to blend them in with curriculum design and transformative metaphor. I can’t wait to read some simple fiction after this!

– David Butler