Ramblemuse Touch Points

This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s “Things” from the Pain Summit (Literally); another means of extracting information from the 1811 tweets from the San Diego Pain Summit 2017.

This time I took the 100 top words from the Pain Summit tweets, excluding the first word, which was pain. Other than as a consistency check, the presence of the word pain contains little information at a conference whose theme is pain. The list of tweets below are those extracted from the entire body of tweets based on containing at least two words in the top 100 vocabulary words, a simple means of auto-summarizing a body of text. By the 100th word in the vocabulary, a given word is showing up in only 17 tweets, less than 1% of the total body of 1811 tweets.

It’s not a terribly profound method, but provides another digestible-size peek through the keyhole at the information tweeted from the 2017 summit.

• Enhance placebo, avoid nocebo: How contextual factors affect PT outcomes https://t.co/U4aQoZMJvl Maybe of interest… https://t.co/KdpukTPcYW
• Headache causes? tired, stress, etc. Risk factors for headache are same as for back pain. Sensitivities fluctuate.
• Emerging research on systemic inflammation and gut health worth following in its relationship to pain.
• Negative beliefs, fear of movement, and decreased self-efficacy are predictive of long term disability.
•  We should be teaching healthy ways to respond to pain and injury in school health classes.

• Psychosocial factors can affect specific hormones, such as HPD, that can affect severity of MS pain https://t.co/1dvxtPUNWj
•  Psychosocial factors can affect specific hormones, such as HPD, that can affect severity of MS pain https://t.co/A246wazFa3
• Distress, pain, and behavioral responses. Sleep deprivation and sleep cycle disruption are important also.
• A lot of the timing of TrA [Transversus Abdominis] contraction studies have never been replicated.
• Teach kids to be strong and resilient – walk or ride to school with backpack – load those bones while young!

• People with chronic LBP [low back pain] tend to use double the amount of muscle activation to lift – increases load/work/force.
• Many localized pain conditions do worse with continued direct treatment – less poking, rolling, needling maybe better.
• Correlation between pain, disability, depression anxiety and increased trunk muscle contraction – protective, makes sense but unhelpful.
• “You’re not going to end up like that (disability) because you’re not on that path, you don’t need to work so damned hard to avoid it”.
• Total combined treatment effect: non-specific FX [function] of the clinical encounter and the specific FX of tx [treatment], e.g. of advice.

• Disability burden of LBP rising in face of spending increasing amounts of $ on diagnostic imaging and procedures.
• “Consider looking at exercise as a means of imparting progressive physical and psychological stress, not strengthening”.
• Farmer – Can prime later learning and enhance encoding after (caffeine, amphetamine, scent of opposite sex).
• Moyer: 2004 meta-analysis refutes claim that massage reduces stress hormones.
• Diagnosis and classification of pelvic girdle pain disorders via case studies. https://t.co/JWhgUJ09wo and https://t.co/0zly6ZH52l

• Mogil – We’ve settled on two species (mice and rats) and limited strains of those. Lacks genetic diversity.
• How could we reasonably extrapolate to humans the results of a study on one strain of rat? #inconvenientquestion
• 70% of chronic pain is reported by females – Irony: 79% of rats in studies are male only. #mismatch
• 70% of chronic pain suffers are documented/reported to be female. To @jptlowy’s ?, do men suffer less, or more quietly? Impact on research?
• C.Vandyken’s study: 182 invited to participate, n=100 post-exclusion criteria. [Major exclusion criteria were catastrophizing and refusal of pelvic exam]