Tim Cocks Email & Phone Number

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Adelaide

Adelaide

Undertaking research under the supervision of Lorimer Moseley and David Butler:We know that in general most people tend to think that when they experience pain it is as a result of some harm or damage occurring in their body. While this belief may not pose a problem when a person sprains their ankle and proceeds to recover over a period of weeks, it can pose a very significant problem when a person experiences ongoing pain for months or years with no identified injury or ‘cause’. This kind of chronic pain poses an enormous health burden worldwide and current medicine struggles to manage this problem, often resorting to increasingly powerful and equally, potentially harmful, medications. Teaching people about the biology of pain; the involvement of the nervous system, especially the brain, about the changes that take place in the nervous system and the brain when pain continues and strategies to reverse these changes and reduce pain is one of the most powerful and effective approaches and has no harmful side effects. However teaching people about pain, or any complex scientific concept is difficult, with some people quickly grasping and understanding the concepts while others demonstrate stubborn misconceptions. In the field of education research, it has been suggested that students that have certain mental frameworks or “schemas” for understanding complex processes in nature will be better able to understand new complex processes or concepts that they are trying to learn. This project will help us to find out if people who have pain are more easily able to learn a modern, scientific understanding of pain if they already have schemas that allow them to understand complex processes and patterns. Finding this out will assist in developing potentially new and more effective ways to teach people about pain.