In this episode, we're discussing the different types of psychological therapies available for the treatment of chronic pain. Do they help? Are they safe? How much confidence can we place in them and what we should further investigate regarding this topic as we move forward? My expert guest this episode is Dr. Amanda Williams. Amanda was a full-time clinician in a pain management program for many years, then she transitioned to teaching and research. She's a professor of clinical health psychology at The University College London and a consultant clinical psychologist at the Pain Management Centre University College London Hospital in the United Kingdom. We discussed the findings from her paper called , which can be found in the August 2020 Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews. The paper updates the literature regarding the effectiveness of different kinds of psychological therapy, including traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and behavioral therapy.

It also asks the question as to whether these interventions are safe and if we've investigated safety and harm enough in the literature. This paper was well-received by many, however, as with any study, there were some questions regarding the findings and how much emphasis we should place on psychological therapies versus other types of therapies to help people living with chronic pain. The paper also had some significant criticisms as to developing research base around acceptance and commitment therapy for chronic pain, a topic we've discussed many times on the show. It's important that as professionals and as general members of the public, we’re informed as to the argument and all sides of the literature, research, and perspectives with regard to the various treatments of psychological therapies for the treatment of chronic pain. We discuss all of this and more on this episode. Let's meet Dr. Amanda Williams.

We're discussing the association between Alzheimer's and chronic pain. My expert guest is Dr. Dale Bredesen. He's a professor at UCLA and the President of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. His work focuses on the mechanisms leading to neurodegeneration. With his research group, he's published over 220 scientific papers leading to the first description of the reversal of cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease. His book, The End of Alzheimer's, is a New York Times bestseller and is now available in 32 languages. Let's get ready and let's meet Dr. Dale Bredesen and learn about the link between Alzheimer's and chronic pain.

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Thanks for joining me for another episode of the show. It's an honor and a pleasure to spend this time with you. If you follow along with other episodes, you may have noticed that we've taken a somewhat narrow focus on the effective treatment of pain either from an individual perspective or identifying which methods have evidence that we can utilize and weave into our existing clinical practice. We're going to take a wider, broader focus and look at the impact of chronic pain as a global health priority. Joining us as our expert guest is Dr. Christopher Williams. Chris is a research fellow and health services researcher with a background in both exercise science as well as physiotherapy.

He currently has a joint role within the public health unit where he established and leads the musculoskeletal health services program, a research practice program that focuses on improving the coordination of public health and clinical services to optimize the management of health risk factors associated with a musculoskeletal condition. This program collaborates with stakeholders from multiple settings including clinical care units, community health, and industry partners to optimize both prevention as well as treatment. His work focuses on developing and testing new approaches to prevention and care as well as practice change methods to influence the use and adoption of evidence-based approaches.

On this episode, you'll learn what makes pain a public health issue and how it differs from a population health issue, how pain management fits into public health, what we can learn from public health to help reduce the burden of pain, the biggest challenges we face when dealing with pain in a public health model and how research at times has failed to inform clinical practice and what we can do about it. I'm excited to be sharing this episode with you with regard to the impact of chronic pain as a public global health priority. Without further ado, let's begin, and let's meet Dr. Christopher Williams.