Thinking Differently About Pain: Profs Christine Chambers & Michael Sullivan


DATE
Tuesday September 23, 2014
TIME
5:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Green Visiting Professors rethink a chronic problem
Join Christine Chambers, Canada Research Chair in Pain and Child Health, Dalhousie University and Michael Sullivan, Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Health, McGill University for their fascinating talk on new ways of addressing pain.
These jointly appointed Green Visiting Professors address their theme by foregrounding psychological and social factors that determine pain experience and expression, a perspective that dramatically increases the potential for effective interventions with poorly controlled acute and chronic pain beyond what can be achieved by attending to sensory experience, biological processes and pharmacological interventions.
Christine Chambers’ work focuses upon infants and children and includes study of the impact of parental and other family influences on pain in healthy children and children in clinical need, children’s empathy and memory for pain, and protocols for controlling clinical procedural pain. Michael Sullivan’s orientation is toward adult pain, particularly the cognitive and emotional idiosyncratic reactions that predispose to maladaptive and excessive distress and failure to respond to treatment, the origins of these dispositions in life history and current social factors, the factors that influence how we react to pain in others, and emerging treatment interventions designed to target pain-related psychosocial risk factors. The key question raised in this lecture is: given high levels of poorly controlled acute and chronic pain, how might we transform health care delivery by incorporating novel ways of thinking of and addressing pain?
Learn more about these Visiting Professor in the Green College Spotlight.

 


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