Emily Walker

I was delighted to be invited to write a clinical update as part of the International Association for the Study of Pain’s 2025 Global Year 🌏

Check it out 👉 journals.lww.com/painrpts/ful...

One-Page Patient Fact Sheets for Low Back Pain in Primary Care url:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2836549?utm_source=bluesky&utm_campaign=content-shareicons&utm_content=article_engagement&utm_medium=social&utm_term=071825 📚

World Physio Congress 2025 highlights:
-Seeing physios in diverse settings, esp crisis/emergency settings
-Seeing the knowledge from physios in Gaza on trauma-informed care
-Emphasis on multi-level determinants affecting health

Great to connect with clinicians from the Critical Physio Network 💪

"Critical" sometimes causes confusion. It refers to challenging taken-for-granted assumptions & expose entrenched, asymmetrical forms of power. It is primarily used in physio to create space for new forms of thinking & practice (e.g. challenging the primacy of the body-as-machine).

Critical physiotherapy: a ten-year retrospective - PubMed Critical physiotherapy has been a rapidly expanding field over the last decade and could now justifiably be called a professional sub-discipline. In this paper we define three different but somewhat i...

In critical physiotherapy the “human” is deeply political: humanity is embedded in history, shaped by it and myriad social forces, & conditioned by relations of power in which
some are able to assert their status & privilege at the
expense of others.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37688439/

unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploa...

Tackling health inequities requires widening our lens to understand how jobs, working conditions, education, housing, social inclusion & even political power influence individual & community health.

One way to understand what Marmot calls the “causes of the causes” is to ask new questions:

Australian Pain Society Conference done! #AusPainSoc

Presented on the mechanisms of patient-led goal setting & pain science education ✅

Received updates on IASP 2025 Global Year through Australian lens (ISSHOOS published soon: www.isshoos.org)

Informative work at the 'rural realities' workshop

Figure 3. Potential avenues to apply a multilevel conceptualization of social aspects of pain to advance equitable pain prevention and management.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38897311/

Figure 1. Examples of contextual intersectional health inequities.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38107758/

Social is often positioned as a separate domain to people's health, a binary of medical/psychological, or conflated with individual.

Social isn’t just personal context, but also social structures, ideologies & institutions that privilege interests of dominant groups

www.jpain.org/article/S152...

That’s awesome! It was a really lovely crowd ☺️

-Examples of co-design with Māori people and their value for other forms of knowledges can be valued more in Australia
-Difference between reflection, critical reflection & critical reflexivity

Some conference reflections:
-Important to focus on the demands the health system puts on patients instead of referring to patients’ “low health literacy” as the reason for challenges (Susan Reid’s work)

I had the pleasure of presenting at the New Zealand Pain Society Conference this week 😍

I spoke about the complexities of clinical practice when providing evidence-based practice to people with chronic low back pain & linked them to the conference theme of “equitable outcomes in pain care”

When someone receives treatment for a MSK pain condition - the total treatment effect encompasses the specific effect of the treatment, contextual effects, and non-specific effects.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What determinants play a key role in the lived experience of persistent pain and recovery?

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Reframing pain care: An equity lens on psychosocial and behavioural interventions This review critically examines psychosocial and behavioural interventions for chronic pain through an equity lens. We interrogate relevant literature…

Political, economic, and cultural systems regulate social relations at a societal level, and define resource distribution, impacting pain prevalence and treatment access.

Ideas are organised into three broad categories; justice, access and knowledge

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Would love to see!

4 of the themes describe what it means to live with chronic pain & 6 of the themes describe what it means to be on a healing journey with pain.

“A Healing Journey with Chronic Pain: A Meta-Ethnography Synthesising 195 Qualitative Studies”

academic.oup.com/painmedicine...

"Listen to me, learn from me": a priority setting partnership for shaping interdisciplinary pain training to strengthen chronic pain care - PubMed What are the care-seeking priorities of people living with chronic pain and carers and how can these shape interdisciplinary workforce training to improve high-value pain care? Phase 1: Australian peo...

“Listen to me, learn from me & hear what I’m telling you, it makes me feel like my concerns have been understood”

“Provide a holistic approach to my care that is tailored & looks after my physical, mental, occupational, social, spiritual & intellectual needs”

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35384928/

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

“System (eg. biomedical orientation), organisational (eg. key performance indicators) and professional (eg. identity as expert) factors compete with person-centred rehabilitation”

Great work by Prof Nicola Kayes

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

It often takes me a few goes to understand words like ontology, epistemology, positivist and constructivist…The breakdown in the paper is gold!

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34457699/