"If I keep running, will I be causing more damage?"

I think all runners have asked themselves this question at some point. If you have knee pain, and your x-ray shows that you have arthritis, we think that makes sense right? What if your x-ray shows that you have arthritis, but you have no pain at all and you can run as much as you want?

This kind of thing happens all the time. People with scans showing "damage" or "degeneration" but have no pain. How are we to make sense of this?

The difficulty here is that we are talking about pain. While we may think that pain is a fairly straightforward subject, nothing could be further from the truth. Today on the show, Mike Stewart will be joining me to help shed some light on this very confusing and strange subject. Mike has a wonderful gift for taking immensely complicated subjects like pain neuroscience and discussing them in a way that is easy to understand and often quite entertaining. He uses metaphors and stories to explain complex biochemistry and biopsychosocial concepts. If you have not come across Mike before, you will be very glad you did.

Mike is a physiotherapist, researcher and university lecturer with over twenty years experience of helping people to overcome pain. He has an MSc in Education and Physiotherapy and is planning a PhD focusing on how people in pain make sense of their experience.

Mike teaches across a variety of clinical settings including elite sports, and is an advisor on pain management to the International Olympic Committee. Mike has taught his Know Pain courses to over 1000 clinicians in 17 countries all over the world.

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