Acute pain is “a normal, predicted physiological response and experience to a noxious chemical, thermal or mechanical stimulus associated with acute illness, trauma or surgery”.1,2 Acute pain is usually sudden in onset, limited in time, and motivates behavioral responses to avoid actual or potential tissue damage.
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For many children, needle procedures can be a painful and distressing experience. Such negative experiences can further develop into fear of needles (McMurtry et al., 2015) with a possibility of adverse consequences, such as health care avoidance behavior and vaccine hesitancy. Given the current combat with the COVID-19 pandemic and global vaccination campaign, which since recently also includes children, reducing fear of needles is important to consider and manage (Love and Love, 2021).
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Just imagine, going to a medical practice with your child for an injection. Or for those of you that are not a parent yet, go back in time for a second and think of a moment you remember going for a puncture procedure yourself with your mother or father.
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Did you know ZORA already? ZORA is a humanoid robot, which means she is designed to appear human characteristics, such as movements and appearance. Humanoid robots can be programmed to work with people, and to communicate verbally and nonverbally.
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A vlog by Prof. Roselien Pas
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I bet you all know someone in your close environment – a friend, family member, workmate - who suffers from chronic pain. Maybe chronic pain even controls your own life from time to time? Let me reassure you, you’re not the only one.
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Similar as in adults, children’s pain experience occurs within a complex biopsychosocial framework. However, the presence of specific factors and their relative share in contributing to the development and maintenance of pain in children are distinct from those in adults.
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Pain has always been a matter of interest to those involved in rehabilitation and medicine. Decades of research has led to the understanding that pain is an extensive and complex mechanism, influenced by thoughts, emotions, context, previous experiences, perceptions, etc.
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Manchikanti and colleagues (2011) make in their paper entitled ‘placebo and nocebo in interventional pain management: a friend or a foe – or simply foes?’ an argument for a revaluation of placebo effects in clinical practice. They make the claim that clinicians should not try to avoid the placebo effect, but should try to potentiate it, as this effect isn’t just unethical and mythical but must seen as a very real phenomenon, which can be understood from a vast body of both psychological and neurophysiological research.
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A new fascinating study from the Harvard Medical School (Boston, U.S.A.) adds to the evidence that conservative interventions can retrain the brain (ref. 1). Laura Simons and her colleagues reported marked differences in functional brain connectivity between pediatric complex regional pain syndrome patients and age-sex matched control subjects, but also normalization of such differences following in-house rehabilitation.
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Therapeutic pain neuroscience education (TPNE) is becoming increasingly popular as (part of) the treatment of (chronic) pain and aims at altering the patient’s thoughts and beliefs about pain. Previous research has demonstrated the efficacy of TPNE in the treatment of chronic pain. TPNE is mostly given in one-on-one sessions, which has limitations, as it is time intensive, cost intensive and limited to patients in remote areas. Pain in Motion previously showed that written TPNE does little to alter pain, pain cognitions or illness perceptions in patients with fibromyalgia.
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