Course Notes: Pain by Lorimer Moseley

I just ran through my second watching of a lecture that Lorimer Moseley did on Pain in LA. It was an excellent presentation that was put together by Laree Draper over at movementlectures.com.  Please purchase this product here and help her continue to put out great content.

There were so many valuable examples Lorimer gave that there is no way I could account for all of them. Here are the highlights.

Nociception and Pain

  • Pain is all about meaning.
  • Pain relies on credible evidence to be active.
  • Pain experiments are really nociceptive experiments.
  • Visual experience depends on the evaluation of sensory input.
  • The brain has to figure out how dangerous “x” really is.
  • Pain emerges from the human.
  • Nociception doesn’t make us do anything, but pain will.
  • You can differentiate peripheral and central sensitivity by applying heat to the painful area. Heat ought to increase the symptoms in peripheral nociceptive problems.

Pain Modulators

  • Nociception
  • Anything that modulates the evaluation of danger and protection of body tissue.

Neurotags

  • Small changes in the neurotag can lead to major changes in the output.
  • Any belief you have regarding your pain is linked to the pain neurotag.

Cortical Body Matrix (CBM)

  • The CBM is a network of neural loops that protect and regulate the body physiologically and psychologically.
  • When the pain neurotag becomes facilitated, less and less input needs to occur for it to activate.
  • When pain persists, oftentimes the pain neurotags becomes imprecise; leading to noninvolved neurons firing. This is how pain spreading works.
  • Motor control changes occur due to the above imprecision.
  • It might be possible to treat other afferents to alter the pain experience.

Therapeutic Targets

  1. 1.       Understand Pain
  2. 2.       Identify and defuse all threats
  3. 3.       Normalize the cortical body matrix by promoting precision.

Favorite Lorimer Quotes

  • “Pain is very complex.”
  • “We can’t treat every pain patient with a simple solution.”
  • “The best way to get rid of chronic pain is to chop the person’s head off.”
  • “As soon as you interact with the patient, you are in their brain.”
  • “Always do more today than you did yesterday.”