Professor Annette Willgens is going to be sharing some amazing information about mindfulness. I want to share her bio with you before we begin. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program at Temple University. She has over 30 years of experience in both clinical practice as well as educating students and professionals.
Her scholarly agenda, which is what makes me excited, includes studying mindfulness and how it relates to resilience and stress management. Why I love her work so much is because she's working from the inside. She's working inside an active DPT program to educate future DPTs, future physical therapists, and oftentimes other health professionals that she works with on an interprofessional basis in the university setting.
Mindfulness is important for lots of different physical as well as mental health conditions. It is not being taught so much in PT school. We're excited to share this information with you. I'm personally excited to share her with you. I love her and her work. She's going to have lots of great tools, techniques and tips that you'll learn from her. With that, I'm going to turn it over and we'll begin our show.
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This was a fun episode for me for lots of different reasons. The first reason, I spent a lot of time over past episodes talking about cognitive-behavioral therapies, in essence, if you will, the more top-down approaches for the treatment of chronic pain as well as other health conditions. Being a physical therapist, I work with both the mind as well as the body. I want to turn some attention toward more of the embodied therapies, more of the bottom-up approaches, and how they can have a very positive influence and impact on someone's pain and their overall health.
In this episode, we are going to discuss awareness through movement and how the Feldenkrais Method can be used as a tool for pain management. My guest for this episode is Professor Teresa Miller. She is the Founding DPT Program Director at St. John's University, a graduate of the American Physical Therapy Association Educational Leadership Fellowship, and a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner.
She is an Associate Professor Emeritus from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, where she taught physical therapy for years. Dr. Miller received her PhD in Physical Therapy from Temple University, her MS in School Psychology, a BS in Physical Therapy, and AIS in Physical Therapy Assisting.
In this episode, we discuss what is the Feldenkrais Method, how it is developed, what are the guiding concepts of a Feldenkrais lesson, how Feldenkrais can help those managing chronic pain and how to find a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. A little FYI before we begin this episode, Dr. Miller was one of my professors of Physical Therapy at the State University of New York Health Science Center, Brooklyn way back from 1995 to 1997.
I consider her a colleague, a mentor, as well as a friend. It was lots of fun for me to do this episode with her. It takes you back in time a little bit too when I was a student and reviewing some of the work that she did, which is groundbreaking. Feldenkrais was not so popular in 1995 when I went to PT school. She was one of the first people to introduce me to more of the mind-body as well as embodied approaches to treating pain.
I want to thank her for her time and for joining us for this episode. I know you are getting a lot out of it. I especially want to thank her for her leadership and bring some of these mind-body approaches into my personal practice as a PT but also into the profession and providing evidence for it. Without further ado, let's begin and meet my good friend, Teresa Miller.
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Friends, thanks for joining me on this episode. I am speaking with Physical Therapist Zachary Stearns about how to screen for psychological factors when treating patients with chronic pain. Zachary is a physical therapist in Durham, North Carolina. He's board-certified in Orthopedic Physical Therapy and has worked in outpatient clinics, which have a focus on musculoskeletal pain management. He's currently working on a large research study, which is called the AIM-back program. This is a collaborative effort between Duke University and the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs. He's also a PhD student in Health Sciences.
In this episode, we discuss the benefits of screening for psychological factors or what we call “yellow flags” in chronic pain management. What types of screening tools can you use? Self-report measures that you can use in your practice. As physical medicine professionals, should we be screening for suicidality? If we do have a positive screening, how do we approach that? How do we follow through with that? Finally, the barriers to implementing and screening psychological factors in clinical practice. I want to thank Zachary for joining me on this episode.
If you're a clinician, this is a content-rich episode where we go deep into how to screen for psychological factors, which are important. We also touch on the topic of suicidality. We have a little bit of a healthy discussion on, “Should we be screening for suicide and what do we do after we screen for suicide?” Zachary also just finished writing a paper in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy. I did mention that at the beginning of the episode. It's great. It's really useful and it would help you. Without further ado, let's begin and let's meet physical therapist, Zachary Stearns.
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In this episode, we have two incredible guests. I'm excited to bring two guests with some incredible experience and research behind them to talk about an important topic, which is bringing ACT to a multidisciplinary pain clinic setting. My guests are Physical Therapist Corinne Cooley and Psychologist Heather King. First, I'll tell you about Corinne. She is a Physical Therapist at the Stanford Pain Management Center and a Clinical Residency Faculty Member in the Stanford Orthopaedic Clinical Residency Program in California. She works with pain physicians and pain psychologists to help optimize complex patient care plans, and leads the exercise and movement portion of interdisciplinary outpatient programs.
Psychologist, Heather King, is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Peri-Operative Pain Medicine. She also serves as the Director of the Pain Psychology Fellowship at Stanford. Her areas of expertise are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for pain as well as insomnia, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In this episode, we'll discuss an investigation that Corinne and Heather were both involved in.
This study included an outpatient interdisciplinary approach with pain psychology using ACT as well as physical therapy, and compared that to traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In essence, this was an ACT plus PT intervention compared to a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy intervention alone. They got some interesting data and some results to share. They share how they went about investigating this topic and some of the outcomes as well as the patient population, and how ACT flowed through the psychology as well as the physical therapy part of care.
As you know, I'm a little biased toward mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches, to living life to the fullest, especially with chronic pain. That's why I'm so excited to share Corinne and Heather with you. They also use ACT as their primary form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in their treatment. Just a reminder, if you want to learn more about ACT for chronic pain, there are two great resources for you. The first is my book, which is called Radical Relief. The second is our course, ACT for Chronic Pain, here at the Integrative Pain Science Institute.
Take the time to read about some of the topics we're talking about with regard to chronic pain, both on how ACT can help the psychological aspect as well as the physical aspect of pain. Also, how Heather and Corinne worked together as this tight interdisciplinary team, which is important in the study they created. Hopefully, we can see more of this in healthcare settings. I highly recommend if you're a professional to download the paper. It’s open access. You can read either the paper and follow along with the show or read the paper after. Without further ado, let's begin and meet Physical Therapist Corinne Cooley and Psychologist Heather King.
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