Date: Wednesday, March 13, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., Eastern (US) Time
This webinar is being produced by the International Association for the Study of Pain’s Pain and Trauma Special Interest Group. This group aims to:
- Promote the recognition and appropriate treatment of pain resulting from trauma.
- Promote mutual education and training of healthcare workers who care for survivors of trauma.
- Promote the liaison and exchange of information between pain treatment services and organizations working with survivors of trauma.
- Foster research on all aspects of pain resulting from trauma.
- Establish an international forum within the pain field for discussion and action, using knowledge about pain to mitigate the health effects of trauma.
Health and social care professionals need to constantly evolve to stay relevant. Increased appreciation for the broad influences on the individual pain experience can drive introspection regarding these professionals’ thinking and practices. Historically, theories describing the complexity of pain have often been too simplistic – and a narrow focus on the biomedical approach has been hard to resist. As such, a better understanding of the sensitivity of the nervous system and the body’s response to threat or danger seems important across all areas of healthcare. Similarly, the entirety of one’s life experiences are likely to contribute to a susceptibility in experiencing pain.
A parallel body of work has been exploring issues of trauma – not traumatic injury – but the protective response of the body to distressing and overwhelming life events. This presentation will bring the current concepts of pain and trauma together – and draw attention to those challenged by pain and whose trauma is under recognized. Participants include:
- Dominic Aldington, FFPMRCA, FRCA, National Health Service, UK
- Lester Jones, PhD, Singapore Institute of Technology
About the Presenters
Dominic Aldington, FFPMRCA, FRCA, is a consultant in pain medicine. Following a career in the British Army as an anesthesiologist – during which he designed the pain management pathway from point of injury to rehabilitation – he now works in the UK’s National Health Service. His particular interest is the management of pain after trauma, especially in the veteran population. He is the current Chair of IASP’s Pain and Trauma SIG.
Lester Jones, PhD, is an experienced educator and APA-titled pain physiotherapist. He has had academic positions in the United Kingdom, Australia, and now Singapore (since 2018), where he is a senior lecturer at the Singapore Institute of Technology. He was the first physiotherapist awarded MScMed (PainMgt) at the University of Sydney (Australia), the inaugural chair of the APA National Pain Group, and was the lead tutor on pain topics for La Trobe University’s (Melbourne, Australia) master’s programs for sports and musculoskeletal physiotherapy. Much of his scholarly work has been exploring pain as a multidimensional experience and he has published on labor pain, stress and pain, sports-related pain, pain associated with survivors of torture, as well as clinical reasoning – in particular applying the Pain and Movement Reasoning Model which he co-created. He is currently into his third term on the Pain Association of Singapore Council, he is the Secretary of IASP Pain and Trauma SIG, and – since September 2022 – he is an elected member of the IASP Council.