Peter Wemyss-Gorman - Innovative Approaches To Chronic Pain

INNOVATIVE
APPROACHES TO
CHRONIC PAIN

UNDERSTANDING THE
EXPERIENCE OF PAIN
AND SUFFERING AND
THE ROLE OF HEALING

Edited by Peter Wemyss-Gorman

Peter Wemyss-Gorman was a consultant anaesthetist until his retirement in 2000. He established a pain clinic in the early 1970s at a time when this was a relatively new concept. The realization that medical interventions were frequently inadequate to relieve chronic pain and that much more was needed to help patients live with their suffering led to the establishment of the first multidisciplinary pain management programme outside London in the South-East of England. But even this failed many people, and the consequent dissatisfaction and uncertainty of purpose, shared by many colleagues, led to the series of meetings that have provided the material for this book.

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches medical students. Her research examines the experience of illness and of receiving healthcare. She holds a Senior Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust, for a project entitled Life of Breath. She believes that as embodied persons we experience illness primarily as a disruption of the lived body, rather than as a dysfunction of the biological body, which is the focus of most modern medicine, and that phenomenology is a neglected philosophical tool for enhancing our understanding of this experience as well as communication between healthcare practitioners and patients. She is the author of the books Illness , Phenomenology of Illness and Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger . She writes from the perspective of a sufferer from a rare lung disease which causes constant severe breathlessness. She has found that lack of empathy in health care professionals and others is one of the most hurtful things about illness, and simple acts of kindness and consideration sometimes the most helpful.

Betsan Corkhill is a lifestyle health coach specializing in working with people with long-term conditions, particularly ongoing pain. She has a clinical background in physiotherapy, which she left in 2002 having become frustrated at the system she found herself in, working in the community and being expected to treat people with multiple comorbidities in a few visits when many had the capacity to improve significantly given time and ongoing guidance. She is a passionate advocate for a whole-person approach to health and now runs her own Wellbeing for People with Pain programme. Since discovering the meditative, creative and social benefits of knitting, especially knitting in groups, for managing day-to-day stress and ill health she has pioneered the foundation of such groups through the organization Stitchlinks, and her book Knit for Health and Wellness: How to Knit a Flexible Mind and More has sold around the world and is translated into several languages.

Paul Dieppe is Emeritus Professor of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Exeter Medical School. He is a doctor who specialized in rheumatology before working in health services research. His main research interest in the early part of his career was clinical aspects of osteoarthritis, such as why it is frequently not painful. He has always been interested in the value of caring, and human interactions in health care. This led to research on the placebo and nocebo effects, as well as issues such as dignity in health care. He is now an emeritus professor at both Exeter and Bristol universities, where he is doing research on healing and wellbeing. He has reframed his interest in placebo effects as being about healing.

Raanan Gillon is a hybrid of retired general practitioner and philoso-pher. He is Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics at Imperial College London, past chairman and now honorary president of the Institute of Medical Ethics and he was president of the British Medical Association for 20192020. He has a first-class degree in philosophy and was editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics for 20 years and a part-time NHS general practitioner for 28 years. He has published extensively on medical ethics and his elderly book Philosophical Medical Ethics is in its 13th print. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the four principles approach to medical ethics (beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice) and for humanity in the expression of these in medical care.

Jonathan Koffman is Reader in Palliative Care at the Cicely Saunders Institute, Kings College London. His role encompasses both research and teaching at postgraduate and undergraduate level. He has developed a research portfolio that comprises three areas: (1) designing and evaluation of complex interventions; (2) the relationship between ethnicity, culture and the experience of advanced disease, specifically cancer and multiple sclerosis; and (3) the experience and impact of disadvantaged dying and social exclusion. His research on the epidemiology of advanced disease, needs assessment, social exclusion at the end of life, ethics, social diversity and advanced disease has been published extensively in high-impact peer-reviewed journals.

John D. Loeser is Professor Emeritus of Neurological Surgery and Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, and was the director of the Multidisciplinary Pain Center at the University of Washington from 1983 to 1997. He was a founding member of both the American Pain Society and the International Association for the Study of Pain, and served both as president. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia in 19891990. He has been active in research, teaching and patient care in the field of pain management for 50 years and has lectured throughout the world.

David Reillys 40 years as a doctor were mostly spent caring for patients as an NHS consultant physician, complemented as a researcher and teacher. With gratitude for the tools that modern medicine brings, his work progressively involved learning to help the many people for whom these tools are partly or wholly ineffective, even damaging. The recovery paths he discovered taught him to focus on catalysing innate strengths and activating substantial shifts in ways of living. As it became evident that his patients predicaments foreshadowed the rising tide of epidemics of long-term conditions, and the international health crisis that has now created, his work expanded to partner with the Public Health Institute of Scotland, lead the creation of the Scottish NHS Centre for Integrative Care, and offer input to Scottish government policy as the National Clinical Lead for Integrative Care. Now, as a director of TheWEL charity and TheWELWorld organization, he is working on scaling up the changes that his patients have taught him are needed in our approach to wellbeing and health.

Clare Roques is a Consultant Anaesthetist and Inpatient Pain Lead at Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals. She has just completed her cross-disciplinary PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled The Treatment of Pain in India: power and practice. She has an interest in global education in pain management and is the chair and founder member of the Essential Pain Management (EPM) Advisory Group at the Faculty of Pain Medicine at the Royal College of Anaesthetists. In this role she has overseen the roll-out of the EPM educational programme in medical schools across the UK as well as in low- and middle-income countries. She is a member of the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists Pain Management Committee.