I came across a couple of interesting pieces on movement/motor control last week, one from the NOI group called a time for motor freedom. In the piece the author talks about how in a study in Australia the participants were split into two groups both of which were given a booklet to read one group then received 20×1 hour sessions based on motor control principles and graded activity. The other group received a 30 minute educational session where they read the booklet and were able to ask questions. The outcome was that neither approach was particularly better than the other in terms of patient outcome but this was perhaps biased towards the exercise approach given the background of the therapists involved. The point that the author makes, I think, is that we should not belittle the importance of education in dealing with chronic pain and we should be looking as to how best to incorporate this into our treatment models. The outcome and the importance of education and the choice of language we use similar to the results of the study mentioned in this post and the other link within regarding the use of language around pain.
In a similar topic Ben from Cor-Kinetic wrote a nice piece called Being liberated from movement control where he talks about the need to get away from rigid movement control in everything we do and place it back in a more appropriate context. He isn’t saying that we don’t need movement/motor control but that we need to be critical about where we use it and that there are those, chronic back pain sufferers, whom we want to free from excessive movement control.
