Lorimer Moseley

116 posts · 93,788 views

BodyInMind looks at the relationship between the body, the brain and the mind and how they interact particularly in chronic and complex pain disorders. Lorimer Moseley and collaborators explore how the mind influences physiological regulation of the body and how we can teach people about it all in a way that is both interesting and accurate.

BodyInMind
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  • April 15, 2010
  • 05:00 PM
  • 1,965 views

When the pain of carpal tunnel syndrome spreads, we should be thinking dorsal horn not malingering

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind


Here is an important study.  A couple of Italian Neurologists have investigated people with carpal tunnel syndrome who report that their pain has spread beyond the boundaries of the median nerve.  Unfortunately, such reports are often misinterpreted by clinicians as evidence of malingering, or hysteria.  Well, these fellows did quantitative sensory testing and came up [...]... Read more »

[1] Caliandro P, La Torre G, Aprile I, Pazzaglia C, Commodari I, Tonali P, & Padua L. (2006) Distribution of paresthesias in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome reflects the degree of nerve damage at wrist. Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology, 117(1), 228-31. PMID: 16325467  

[3] Treede RD, Jensen TS, Campbell JN, Cruccu G, Dostrovsky JO, Griffin JW, Hansson P, Hughes R, Nurmikko T, & Serra J. (2008) Neuropathic pain: redefinition and a grading system for clinical and research purposes. Neurology, 70(18), 1630-5. PMID: 18003941  

[4] Wilder-Smith EP, Ng ES, Chan YH, & Therimadasamy AK. (2008) Sensory distribution indicates severity of median nerve damage in carpal tunnel syndrome. Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology, 119(7), 1619-25. PMID: 18467170  

  • February 24, 2011
  • 07:43 AM
  • 1,300 views

Does smoking hurt as well as harm? (or, as if you needed another reason)

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

TweetI have a couple of mates who are veritable smoke-stacks. They love smoking but sort of hate being a smoker. I must confess that, at least within my community, smoking is now officially uncool and my mates are sick of people telling them good reasons to give up.  Well, as if they needed another reason, [...]... Read more »

Pisinger C, Aadahl M, Toft U, Birke H, Zytphen-Adeler J, & Jørgensen T. (2011) The association between active and passive smoking and frequent pain in a general population. European journal of pain (London, England), 15(1), 77-83. PMID: 20627783  

  • March 7, 2011
  • 02:30 PM
  • 1,249 views

Sadness, soreness and staying alert—all in the same place

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Sadness, soreness and staying alert - are they all in the same place of the brain?... Read more »

Shackman AJ, Salomons TV, Slagter HA, Fox AS, Winter JJ, & Davidson RJ. (2011) The integration of negative affect, pain and cognitive control in the cingulate cortex. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 12(3), 154-67. PMID: 21331082  

Dum RP, Levinthal DJ, & Strick PL. (2009) The spinothalamic system targets motor and sensory areas in the cerebral cortex of monkeys. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(45), 14223-35. PMID: 19906970  

Kanske P, Heissler J, Schönfelder S, Bongers A, & Wessa M. (2010) How to Regulate Emotion? Neural Networks for Reappraisal and Distraction. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991). PMID: 21041200  

  • January 8, 2010
  • 04:00 PM
  • 1,239 views

Stuart Derbyshire on I feel your pain

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind



Several studies have demonstrated that people can share in the emotion of someone else’s pain. Typically, when seeing someone else injured, there is a tendency to share in the aversion and feel the unpleasantness of what is going on. But there have also been a few cases of people reporting not just a shared [...]... Read more »

Stuart Derbyshire. (2009) Stuart Derbyshire on I feel your pain. BodyInMind. info:/

  • June 14, 2010
  • 03:00 PM
  • 1,163 views

Back Pain Myths Closing Sale Everything must go

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Everyone knows all about low back pain. This is probably by virtue of the fact that most of us have or will experience it at some stage. Everyone is an expert, clinicians and patients alike and there are a whole host of accepted truths about back pain that we all cling on to. Ideas that [...]... Read more »

  • February 3, 2010
  • 04:00 PM
  • 1,149 views

Where is my back?

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind


Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble ‘feeling’ their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt [...]... Read more »

Lorimer Moseley. (2010) I can't find it!. BodyinMind. info:/

  • December 12, 2010
  • 02:05 PM
  • 1,102 views

The painful legacy of torture

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Torture has received a great deal of deserved media attention in recent years. In large part this is due to people who should know better somewhat shamelessly jumping through legal hoops in attempts to distinguish which ways of abusing their fellow humans are acceptable and distinct from torture. This should be surprising in the current [...]... Read more »

Williams AC, Peña CR, & Rice AS. (2010) Persistent pain in survivors of torture: a cohort study. Journal of pain and symptom management, 40(5), 715-22. PMID: 20678891  

  • July 8, 2010
  • 04:00 PM
  • 1,096 views

Time to brush up on your acting

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

We are lucky enough to have three rather clever and certainly friendly med students working on some research studies.  This post is from Rahul – it is about a paper we thought was interesting.  We wonder if there might be something in it for our quest for better treatments.  Here’s Rahul- After a nauseating movie-going [...]... Read more »

  • May 20, 2010
  • 03:30 PM
  • 1,068 views

Of mice and men – Jeff Mogil on grimacing

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind


You have almost certainly noticed that we grimace when we are in pain. But have you thought about that – I mean really thought about it? Why grimace?  Well, someone who clearly thinks about such things more than most is a fellow called Jeff Mogil – Professor of Pain Type Stuff at the very pain-posh [...]... Read more »

Langford, D., Bailey, A., Chanda, M., Clarke, S., Drummond, T., Echols, S., Glick, S., Ingrao, J., Klassen-Ross, T., LaCroix-Fralish, M.... (2010) Coding of facial expressions of pain in the laboratory mouse. Nature Methods. DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1455  

  • December 8, 2010
  • 03:00 PM
  • 1,058 views

Low back pain – time we sang from the same song sheet

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Is it possible that a lack of centralisation reflects a predominance of centralisation?  Well, the undisputed wrestling champion of physical therapy is wrestling with this very topic, having been motivated by an intruiging paper.  Fortunately for BiM, John kindly agreed to write a post on it. Here it is: Here is a riddle for you. [...]... Read more »

  • September 9, 2010
  • 08:00 AM
  • 1,055 views

World Congress on Pain throws up a few gems

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

I have just been in Montreal for the World Congress on Pain – numerous presentations and about 1600 posters.  It is the posters I really like – can be intimidating but there are always a few gems.  Here is some preliminary work that I thought was interesting and which is relevant to work that our [...]... Read more »

  • April 26, 2010
  • 05:14 PM
  • 1,054 views

Five questions you should ask a patient in pain

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind


I recently did a talk for a bunch of GP’s. The brief I got was to make the really tough task of assessing someone in pain a little easier – ‘Perhaps you could tell them which questions to ask’ were the exact words I think. So, here are the slides.  I have tried to make [...]... Read more »

Moseley G Lorimer. (2007) Reconceptualising pain according to modern pain science. Physical Therapy Reviews, 12(3), 169-178. info:/

Treede, R., Jensen, T., Campbell, J., Cruccu, G., Dostrovsky, J., Griffin, J., Hansson, P., Hughes, R., Nurmikko, T., & Serra, J. (2008) Neuropathic pain: Redefinition and a grading system for clinical and research purposes. Neurology, 70(18), 1630-1635. DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000282763.29778.59  

  • January 5, 2010
  • 05:30 PM
  • 1,046 views

Further evidence to suggest we should learn something novel every decade

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

I remember sitting my folks down and sternly counselling them to make sure they learnt a completely novel skill once per decade, to ensure that their brain doesn’t turn to mush.  There is plenty of evidence to support such advice (well, aside from the ‘mush’ bit), but here is a new finding that adds to [...]... Read more »

Lorimer Moseley. (2010) Further evidence to suggest we should learn something novel every decade. BodyinMind. info:/

  • October 28, 2010
  • 08:00 AM
  • 1,044 views

Introducing DAMIEN – the brain’s default mode network

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Numerous studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain, tell us that chronic back pain (CBP) alters brain function well beyond the feeling of pain and can cause impairments like depression, impaired decision-making and sleep disturbance [1,2]. It was Baliki’s group in 2008 which confirmed for the first time that CBP disrupts the [...]... Read more »

[1] Apkarian AV, Sosa Y, Krauss BR, Thomas PS, Fredrickson BE, Levy RE, Harden RN, & Chialvo DR. (2004) Chronic pain patients are impaired on an emotional decision-making task. Pain, 108(1-2), 129-36. PMID: 15109516  

[2] Baliki MN, Geha PY, Apkarian AV, & Chialvo DR. (2008) Beyond feeling: chronic pain hurts the brain, disrupting the default-mode network dynamics. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 28(6), 1398-403. PMID: 18256259  

[3] Beckmann, C., DeLuca, M., Devlin, J., & Smith, S. (2005) Investigations into resting-state connectivity using independent component analysis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 360(1457), 1001-1013. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2005.1634  

  • June 2, 2010
  • 06:11 PM
  • 1,040 views

Acupuncture, Adenosine and Cycling Fish

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

You may have heard this story as it is all over the popular press right now. We are told that scientists have discovered some of the mechanisms underlying acupuncture analgesia. As always with alternative therapy reports the media have enthusiastically bitten off the hand of the press release (see this great account from the blog [...]... Read more »

  • January 1, 2010
  • 05:00 PM
  • 1,031 views

Benedict Wand on Brain Changes in Chronic Pain

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

It now seems clear that the brain changes in patients with chronic pain problems. However, this is probably where the consensus ends as there is still much that remains unclear and speculative in this area. This elegant study by Rodriguez-Raecke and colleagues from the University of Hamburg (abstract at the end of this article) investigate [...]... Read more »

Benedict Wand. (2009) Benedict Wand on Brain Changes in Chronic Pain. BodyInMind. info:other/

  • February 21, 2011
  • 02:20 PM
  • 1,030 views

Comments from the Lager Man – is NMDAr upregulation 4ever

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

TweetA little while ago, Paul Lagerman said this: “….  I was speaking to a colleague of mine who is a pain specialist and we were discussing central sensitisation.  As I understand it there is a genetic change in the cell nucleus which causes an increase in the embedding of NMDA receptors in the cell synapse, oh [...]... Read more »

Scheetz AJ, & Constantine-Paton M. (1994) Modulation of NMDA receptor function: implications for vertebrate neural development. The FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, 8(10), 745-52. PMID: 8050674  

  • July 5, 2010
  • 06:06 AM
  • 1,021 views

Large flat whites taste stronger than regular flat whites

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Australia is, I think, the home of the Flat White – a coffee that is a bit like a latte with less milk and that has quite recently started infiltrating the UK coffee scene. Of course, Monmouth at Borough Market has been doing a very good flat white for a few years, but then again, [...]... Read more »

  • August 3, 2010
  • 08:00 AM
  • 1,019 views

Is CRPS an auto-immune disease

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Intravenous Immunoglobulin in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Andreas Goebel on the results of his latest clinical trial .Just imagine the causes of some chronic pains are completely different from what you had thought. Complex Regional Pain Syndrome is a severe pain which persists after limb trauma. You are unlucky if you develop this nasty condition, [...]... Read more »

[1] Goebel A, Baranowski A, Maurer K, Ghiai A, McCabe C, & Ambler G. (2010) Intravenous immunoglobulin treatment of the complex regional pain syndrome: a randomized trial. Annals of internal medicine, 152(3), 152-8. PMID: 20124231  

  • September 27, 2010
  • 02:30 PM
  • 1,013 views

The Brain Private Fort or Social Arena?

by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind

Mirror neurons are famous. Some would argue that they are too famous for their own good, others would say that they are the biggest discovery since Dennis Lillee got caught with an aluminium cricket bat.  Well now we are realising that they are not just about movement – here Shikta Dey talks about an interesting [...]... Read more »

Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004) The Mirror-Neuron System. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27(1), 169-192. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230  

[2] Keysers C, Kaas JH, & Gazzola V. (2010) Somatosensation in social perception. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 11(6), 417-28. PMID: 20445542  

[3] Moseley GL, Olthof N, Venema A, Don S, Wijers M, Gallace A, & Spence C. (2008) Psychologically induced cooling of a specific body part caused by the illusory ownership of an artificial counterpart. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(35), 13169-73. PMID: 18725630  

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