Category: Pain Rehabilitation
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5% of US teens live with life altering chronic pain
Acute pain is protective. With chronic pain, the pain itself becomes the disease.
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How to Relax in 5 Minutes
Pain, stress, and emotional distress are in the mind, but express themselves in physical tension. You can feel it in that tight neck, those stiff shoulders, and in that clenched jaw and hands. Notice that your back teeth hurt just a little? Feel that twinge between your shoulders? Back ache just a bit? The relationship is…
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Incomplete Acts, Everyday Anxiety, and Getting Things Done
Four strategies to organize work and decrease anxiety.
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Getting Kids In Pain To School
Concrete tips on moving a teen in pain out of bed and towards functioning.
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Control Your Focus
I’ll be honest. I spend my life crazy stressed. I have a job that my husband describes as ‘flexible – you can work any 60 hours a week you like’. And then I have two more jobs – I am Editor in Chief of the Journal of Adolescence and I’m also starting this company. And…
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Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this.
Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this! Well . . . don’t do this.
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Starting college? Getting the right accommodation plan is essential.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece in my Psychology Today blog for college students about how to talk to their professors about accommodations. Most professors (not all) honestly want to help. But the letters we get from the offices of disability service are usually vague and don’t tell us what students really need.…
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You can’t stop pain by thinking about it
Just a shout out to a good blog on the use of distraction in chronic pain published in Psychology Today.
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Are you a young adult? Are you interested in moving our understanding of pain forward?
This is an ad for a study I’ve been working on with a student (Max Kramer) for the last year. My son took part in the first phase. Max is recruiting an additional 10 participants. It’s pretty easy and participants do get paid. It will contribute to developing a machine learning algorithm to help better…
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Getting Kids to Open Up
When your child is in pain, it’s easy to focus in on the three things that worry us: pain, pills, and homework. I know for myself, just seeing my son’s face triggers that mental checklist.
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Priorities in Pediatric Pain: A Study In Contrasts
Today was a bad pain today. It was noon and already he’d taken all his rescue meds. He’d used all the tricks – double water, salt. He’d already done three hours of biofeedback. And there the pain was – a big looming suffocating force drilling into his brain.
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Colors are Key!
Many people living with chronic pain have a condition called photophobia – their brain interprets light as a painful stimulus. That can make looking at screens a painful experience and makes designing an app extra challenging!
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Creating Videos To Teach Neuroscience
Creating videos that teach complex topics like how neurons fire is a challenge for content creators. That’s one project that Oberlin College intern Carlos Armstrong faced when working with Nancy Darling on 1step2life – and app designed to help teens living with chronic pain get out of bed and take back their lives.
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A Lung Transplant Puts College In Perspective
Art and Text: Carlos Armstrong Warning: this post includes photographs of surgical incisions some people may find upsetting. To me, chronic pain is more than just a subject to research. It is something constantly present in my own life. On the lower end of my pain scale, I have been living with debilitating chronic migraines…
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It’s not theory: Real voices from real people
1step2life’s core mission is to build an app that helps kids living with chronic pain get out of bed and into the world. There are many things that make this project special to me. One, in particular, is how many of the Oberlin students involved GOT involved because they suffer from pain themselves. When we…
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Max Kramer models migraine spreading depression
Max Kramer worked with Oberlin Professor Emeritus Richard Salter and Dr. Nancy Darling to develop a computational model of the spreading neurological depression characteristic of the brain during a migraine. Compuational modeling is a way of using mathematical and logical modeling to simulate behavior in the real world. Max used Numerus software, developed at Oberlin…
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Research: Do kids believe it’s okay for parents to set rules about rehab?
As children become teens, they take more and more control over the decisions that govern their lives. Parents set rules, but teens who disagree with those rules have choices: they can obey, argue, or hide the fact that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to. In the US, most parents and teens agree that it’s…
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I Hate Pain
I’d like to say that I started this company because of my altruistic interest in helping the world. That would be a lie. I started this company because over six short months my son went from healthy to hiding under his covers, in the dark, wearing welding glasses. He would shudder with pain because his…
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We become filmmakers!
One of the many impressive things about Oberlin students is the range of their talents. Ava Dishian and Emily Eisenstein joined my lab as research assistants. As the 1step2life project developed, Ava and Emily stepped up to help us teach people about the difference between healthy pain and how it evolves into long-term and dysfunctional…
1step2life 