Monday, October 13, 2008

VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM ON PAIN

This post is about the up-coming webinar series sponsored by the Canadian Physiotherapy Association and its new Pain Science Division (of which I am a exec. member and one of the founders). An internet approach to current, up-to-the-minute meta-education about pain is being integrated into and embraced by the PT profession in Canada, and I couldn't be more happy about it.

I've had a chance to preview the first webinar, and I can assure you the program will shine in both form and content. The content is not overly difficult - it is easy to follow if you have any medical background. Even if you do not, you can take your time with the material and look up the words you don't know with google. Enter the word "define" (but no quote marks) followed immediately by a colon (like this -> :) and the word you want to look up.

For example, if you wanted to look up the word "nociception" to find out the meaning, you would go to google and enter:

define: nociception

Google will take you to a list of possible meanings.

The technical side of the webinar series is speedy and interactive. You can click on pretty much anything from anywhere, from menus listed on the side or as new menus present themselves. Each module will be accessible for an entire week, can be viewed multiple times, and by more than one individual. A discussion forum will operate, where individuals can log in, ask questions, discuss, and help develop answers for other participants' questions, perhaps from their own specialized level of expertise.

Because this is an internet event and is mostly in virtual time, anyone on the planet can participate (if they use English). Only the last (fourth) session will be in real time, probably sometime during the last week of November.

Every conscious human awareness who is embedded in a physically alive body will have to deal with their own pain circuitry at some time or other during their life span. Pain can be hell, but the more prepared we are, the more we can do about our own response to it at the time. Anyone from any walk of life, therefore, is invited. This is the PT profession, reaching out not only to its own members but to the world, offering everyone some well-organized, coherently-presented and useful basic information on a potentially unpleasant matter that either does or will affect us all.

GO HERE TO REGISTER.