November 28, 2019

Episode 159 | Dr. Samantha Bunzli: Making Sense Of Pain Beliefs And Behaviors

43 minutes

In this episode, we’re talking about making sense of beliefs and behaviors in pain care. Our expert guest is Dr. Samantha Bunzli who is a physiotherapist and has worked in clinical practice for several years before undertaking a PhD with Professor Peter O’Sullivan at Curtin University in Australia. Her PhD research was entitled, “A Qualitative Investigation of Pain-Related Fear in People with Low Back Pain.” She is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne working to optimize treatment outcomes for people with osteoarthritis. Dr. Bunzli’s work is part of an international effort to change the narrative in musculoskeletal pain care. She’s been awarded major grants by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia to improve evidence-based decision-making among orthopedic surgeons and implement non-surgical care pathways for people with end-stage osteoarthritis.

In this episode, you’ll learn why the beliefs people hold about their musculoskeletal pain matter, where do unhelpful beliefs come from, and how the common-sense model could help us understand unhelpful beliefs and behaviors. Samantha describes findings from her qualitative research based on data collected through interviews from both patients as well as clinicians. She is keen to emphasize the qualitative research is more than just the collection of stories. It involves robust methods of data collection and analysis.

Rather than going into detail about these methods, Samantha has provided free access to all of her research in which she explains the science behind qualitative research and describes the contribution qualitative approaches can make in the field of pain science. This includes some of her first work in the Journal Of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy. In 2017, an article titled, “Making Sense of Low Back Pain and Pain-Related Fear,” as well as the 2019 study in the Journal of Clinical Orthopedic Simulated Research titled, “Misconceptions and the Acceptance of Evidence-Based Nonsurgical Interventions for Knee Osteoarthritis: A Qualitative Study.” Let’s learn about how the common-sense model can help us understand unhelpful beliefs and behaviors when it comes to chronic musculoskeletal pain with Dr. Samantha Bunzli.

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