Posts in this category report and/or comments on published articles relevant to rehabilitation. Posts may cover any aspect of the paper, and the paper may cover any aspect of rehabilitation, or even not be specific to rehabilitation. There will always be a connection between the paper and rehabilitation.
In 1978, I submitted my first paper to the British Medical Journal. It concerned what we now refer to as functional disorders, the phenomenon of illness with no identified disease causing it. I have been interested since. A recent editorial by an Oxford colleague, Anton Pick, discussing whether patients with Long Covid had a functional …
Is frailty a helpful concept within the rehabilitation context? I asked myself this question after seeing a recent paper on people with multiple sclerosis that concluded that there was “a significant relationship between frailty and history of falls in multiple sclerosis, independent of age, sex, and disease severity.” Frailty is widely used but without a …
This blog post is based on an extensive systematic review that generated a sound, theoretically-based model of person-centred rehabilitation. I can only develop some central themes and messages here. For more details, read the article. (here) The authors conclude that person-centred rehabilitation “is a way of thinking about and providing rehabilitation services “with” the person.” …
Tamar Makin, in 2021, prefaced her Essay with, “It has long been established that phantom limb pain is a real physiological condition. Why then do we tolerate mystery and myth when it comes to phantom limb pain treatment?” This statement always makes me ask, “What limb pain is not real?” Yet many patients and many …
Most professions initially developed based on trust. Examinations were rare. Doctors (and other professions) learn through experience. For healthcare, as science advanced and increased in importance, examinations in basic sciences were introduced. Once qualified, further advance depended upon the trust of patients and other doctors. Even when I trained, the only examination after qualification was …
“Helping the Public Understand Adverse Events Associated With COVID-19 Vaccinations. Lessons Learned From Functional Neurological Disorder.” (here) Published today (9th April 2021), I think this viewpoint is brave; mentioning Covid-19 and functional disorders in the same title; challenging, because it suggests the bravery is warranted; and, to me, fascinating because it shows how the biomedical …
On 7 April 2021, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, published its guidelines on the diagnosis and management of chronic pain (NG193). I published the first version of this post the same day. Two years later (26 July 2023), I am revising my post because much was poorly written, and there …
This post was precipitated by reading two papers and following references and links in the papers. The post draws attention to the serendipity that can occur on reading a paper, and the enormous changes that have occurred over 40 years. On a practical level, a paper on ‘gamification’ led me to social network measures, and …
A recently published paper discusses placebos used in randomised controlled trials, referring to the placebo medication as “the Unknown Variable in a Controlled Trial”. The short but important paper is worth reading. It made me reflect on the nature of the control in rehabilitation trials – sometimes even referred to as a placebo by the …
Rehabilitation decisions are complex because so many factors have an influence, and we do not know the extent of the impact of each factor, nor do we know about interactions between factors, and we cannot easily compute the final outcome. Artificial intelligence (AI) might help. An interesting paper, just published, shows in a well-designed randomised …
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