Ep22: Beyond Pain: A Deep Dive into Suffering, Whole-Person Approach, and Metaphors with Dr. Peter Stilwell and Dr. Timothy Wideman

Dr. Peter Stilwell is a Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, where he holds a Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). His research is focused on the topics of pain, suffering, and person-centered care. For the past two years, he was the Ronald Melzack Fellow in Chronic Pain Research at the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain (AECRP) at McGill. He was recently awarded the MSCA Fellowship from the European Union, which he will start later this year at the University of Southern Denmark. He has a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC) and has worked mostly with people living with persistent spinal pain and he placed an emphasis on patient education, exercise, and supported self-management. In addition to his research and clinical background, he has been heavily involved in teaching, student supervision, and community-based initiatives, including co-creating and facilitating a highly successful free health education and walking program that attracted over 1700 members.

Dr. Timothy Wideman is an associate professor at the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, at McGill University. The overarching goal of his research program is to improve the lives of people living with pain. His lab works toward this goal by focusing on three streams of research including understanding and targeting biopsychosocial risk factors for prolonged pain and disability, improving entry-level pain education for health professionals through large-scale knowledge translation initiatives, and understanding and addressing pain-related suffering.

In this episode, we talked about an alternative framework to the biopsychosocial model for a whole-person approach to pain care, how metaphors are commonly used languages to describe pain, and the emerging theoretical research to better understand pain-related suffering.

Resources:

Twitter: @Peter_Stilwell

Website: www.drpeterstilwell.com 

Open access paper on pain-related suffering: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34852304/

Painful metaphors: https://mh.bmj.com/content/47/2/235

Dr. Timothy H Wideman website: https://www.mcgill.ca/spot/timothy-h-wideman

Tim’s twitter: @TH_Wideman

Paper published in 2023 on inclusive definition of pain-related suffering and targeted care: https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(22)00459-X/fulltext

Barker KL, et. al. Divided by a lack of common language? A qualitative study exploring the use of language by health professionals treating back pain. BMC Musculoskelet Disord. 2009; 10(123): 1-10.

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