No Pain, No Brain | Summer School

NO PAIN, NO BRAIN

Professor Romy Parker, Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine, University of Cape Town

Monday 16–Tuesday 17 January

9.15 am

COURSE FEES R220

What is pain? In this course we will unpack a modern understanding of pain and how it is managed. In the first lecture participants will be invited to consider how they have felt pain in their own lives to provide insight into the complex sensory emotion that is pain. The idea that pain is a conscious, life-saving construct of the brain will be explored. In the second lecture we will explore some of the novel non-pharmacological treatments that can be used to treat complex chronic pain conditions including phantom limb pain, and chronic widespread pain.

Lecture titles

1. Pain: what is it?

2. Pain: what can we do about it?

Recommended reading

Moseley, G.L. 2007. Painful Yarns: metaphors and stories to help understand the biology of pain. Canberra: Dancing Giraffe Press.

Kamerman, P.R. et al. 2020. Almost 1 in 5 South African adults have chronic pain: a prevalence study conducted in a large nationally representative sample. Pain.161(7):1629–1635. https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/2020/07000/Almost_1_in_5_South_African_adults_have_chronic.19.aspx

Ernstzen, D. et al. 2022. ‘So, you must understand that that group changed everything.’. Perspectives on a Telehealth group intervention for individuals with chronic pain. BMC Musculoskelet Disord. 23, 538. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-022-05467-7

4. Participants will earn 2 CPD points for this course.

BOOK HERE

Romy Parker is a Professor and Director of the Pain Management Unit in the Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Cape Town. She is an active researcher who has successfully supervised numerous postgraduate students. Professor Parker is the course convenor of the Postgraduate Diploma in Interdisciplinary Pain Management, the first programme of its kind in Africa. She is an experienced physiotherapy clinician working in chronic pain management as part of the Chronic Pain Management interdisciplinary team of Groote Schuur Hospital. Her research focusses on pain, with emphasis on developing and testing mechanism-based treatments relevant to a South African context. She serves as a Councillor for the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP - African representative), she is the current past-president of PainSA (the South African chapter of IASP), Past-Chair of the Pain, Mind and Movement Special Interest Group of IASP and an Honorary Life Member of the Pain Management Physiotherapy Group of the South African Society of Physiotherapy. Romy was awarded the UCT Distinguished Teacher’s Award for 2019 – the university’s highest honour for teaching.