Description
This webinar - held on 25 March 2024 - was produced through a collaboration of the IASP's Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA - in particular - the University of Maryland School of Nursing's Placebo Beyond Opinions Center. Both groups are aligned on advancing unbiased knowledge of placebo effects by promoting interdisciplinary investigation of the placebo phenomenon and nurturing placebo research.
The IASP defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage" to better articulate the biopsychosocial dimensions of this phenomenon. While our understanding of pain has greatly evolved over the past decades, there are still fundamental questions that need to be addressed, including its psychological components.
Once such psychological component that has been discussed since the 17th century is the concept of embodiment - or the interplay between body and mind in behavior. Embodiment provides the body something to "incarnate," i.e., emotions/feelings can be direct perceptions of one's body state. In this webinar, we explored this concept of embodiment and its relation to how we perceive body awareness and pain.
Participants included:
-- Christopher Eccleston, PhD, University of Bath, UK
-- Luana Colloca, MD, PhD, University of Maryland School of Nursing, USA (host)
Contributors
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Christopher Eccleston, PhD
Chris is Professor of Pain Science at the University of Bath in the UK where he directs the Center for Pain Research. He has published over 300 peer reviewed scientific publications and is widely cited (web of science h-index of 84). Chris founded and directed the Bath Pain Management Unit from 1994-2008, including the first residential pediatric pain program. He consults internationally on new services and team training in pain management. From 2009-2019 he was psychology editor for the journal PAIN, and coordinating editor of Pain, Palliative and Supportive Care Cochrane Review Group (PaPaS). Chris has published three books with Oxford University Press: In 2016 he published ‘Embodied: the psychology of physical perception’. In 2018 he co-edited an analysis of investments in pain treatment in 37 European countries, in the book ‘European Pain Management’. In 2020, working with Dr Elaine Wainwright, he published a ‘Work and pain: a lifespan development approach’. You can visit his website to learn more here.
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Luana Colloca, MD, PhD
Luana is a MPower Distinguished professor at University of Maryland, School of Nursing, Baltimore, Director of the TL1 program, Chair of the Pain and Placebo Special Interest Group for the International Association for Study of Pain (IASP) Society and the Treasurer for the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of Placebo (SIPS). Colloca holds an MD, a PhD in Neuroscience and a master in Bioethics. She completed a post-doc training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and a senior research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Prof. Colloca received several prestigious awards such as the IASP Wall Patrick Award for basic research on pain mechanisms. Colloca leads an NIH-funded research portfolio on endogenous pain modulation including placebo/nocebo effects and other nonpharmacological interventions such as virtual reality. Colloca and her teamhave been published in top-ranked journals including JAMA, NEJM, Biological Psychiatry, Pain, and Lancet Neurology among others.