March 16, 2022

Episode 269 | The Top Psychological Components Of Pain Rehabilitation With Alexa Knuth, SPT

23 minutes

We're going to talk about psychological aspects of pain rehabilitation that physical therapists perceive as important. When we're talking about research, a new topic or providing new information, oftentimes I'm talking to a pain researcher. It may be someone with a PhD or someone who is actively engaged in investigating different aspects of pain from a lifestyle and a biopsychosocial perspective.

In this episode, I'm introducing you to Alexa Knuth, who is a student physical therapist. Alexa is a student at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland. She is in the last year of her program and she is excited to start a career. Even before she started her career, she had already started to delve into the evidence and contribute to the evidence base by writing a paper called Psychological Aspects of Rehabilitation as Perceived by Physical Therapists. You can all access that. It was published in 2018. I came across it and thought it was important to share with all of you so we're going to be talking about that on the show.

Alexa also has an interest in working with and applying psychological techniques to a specific patient population, which is those who are looking to self-manage inflammatory arthritis like rheumatoid arthritis. There are lots of great applications for this work here. We'll talk about that in this episode as well. Overall, we'll talk about the important psychological techniques people can use for self-management and which physical therapists perceive are the most important.

As you know, psychologically-based care or psychologically-informed physical therapy is something we often discuss on this show. We teach courses on that at the Integrative Pain Science Institute. You can go over and check out our courses as well as the newly released Psychologically-Informed Pain Practitioner Certification. That's a complete certification that discusses the different multimodal approaches that you can use with regard to cognitive and behavioral interventions as well as whole health interventions for treating people with chronic pain. Without further ado, let's begin and meet Alexa Knuth.

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