What does the word placebo mean? Does the placebo effect involve actual health benefits or just imagined benefits? Is placebo “mind over body” or “all in your head”? Is it unethical to provide a client with placebo treatments? And what about nocebos? In this article, I’ll answer these questions and discuss some fascinating research […]
What you see is affected by what you know, and what you hear, and what you touch, and vice versa. This is an example of multi-modal perception. The brain is very complex, and all its different parts integrate and share information acquired from any source – eyes, ears, touch, memories, predictions, expectations, Facebook, etc. We often […]
Unlike drugs, orthopedic surgeries can be sold to the public before they undergo rigorous testing to ensure they are safe and effective. Thus, millions of surgeries for knee, shoulder, and back pain have been done without studies to confirm they actually work. Recently, research has found that many popular surgeries (but not all) work no […]
A baseball player walks into the batter’s box. He shifts weight from front foot to back while circling the bat. Rotates his right heel into the ground. Orients his gaze to the pitcher while pointing his bat to center field. Slowly swings his bat three or four times to an imagined contact point with the […]
There are various models used to understand pain: the neuromatrix model, the biopsychosocial model; Louis Gifford’s Mature Organism Model; the Onion skin model, the biomedical model. And for motor learning and physical training, there is the constraints based model, or dynamic system theory, the various Russian sports science models, non-linear pedagogy, etc. \ […]
Predictive coding is a hip new model for perception that I have been studying lately. In some ways, it is very common sense and intuitive, and in others, it is very challenging and mind-expanding. Here’s a post describing what I’ve learned that I find interesting and practical. Before getting into that, let’s review why any […]