One Hot Model Louis Gifford’s Topical Issues in Pain has an amazing amount of quality information, and has really inspired many thoughts. I’ve only read book 1 thus far, but this book can generate material to expand upon much like Supertraining does for fitness writers. I’m sure many of you folks have seen this picture before. Gifford called this schematic the “Mature Organism Model” (MOM) to illustrate how pain works. Inputs from the tissues and the environment travel up the spinal cord to the brain. The brain processes these inputs and samples information from itself to generate a corresponding output. These outputs are perceived as new inputs which reset the cycle. MOM was of course used to illustrate the three pain types (read here and here), but it is so much more than that. The MOM is a schematic for how the nervous system works. Any input that is processed by the brain may or may not lead to outputs of altered physiology and/or behavior. Viewing (your) MOM (ha) made me think a lot about working with individuals who are dealing with a threat response. How exactly are we helping these folks? I’ve come to believe that we do not treat outputs. At best we can only provide inputs that we hope are exchanged for new, desirable outputs. In patient care, we are hoping to alter perceived threat. We attenuate threat by giving an individual favorable inputs, which we hope leads to favorable behavior and physiological changes. Let’s look at what these
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