Pain self-efficacy

• Jun 1, 2024 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

It’s notoriously hard to relieve pain itself — we do not “have the technology” for most kinds of pain.

But it is “easy” (relatively!) to ease the suffering and disability that pain comes with. While this seems like a poor consolation prize for a lot of people, it should not be underestimated.

From a nice X/Twitter thread by Ben Cormack about the important concept of “pain self-efficacy”…

“PSE is the ability to function with or despite some pain. This could be work, social or family related. PSE is not a magic bullet, but might be part of recovery for some, or even many!”

Read the whole thing (a minute or two). If you cannot bear to visit X-Twitter, you can also read it on ThreadReader.app (but with lots of intrusive ads — sigh, the internet is so broken).