One of our main objectives is to raise money to support vital research that will make a significant difference to the way in which pain is understood and treated. Such research is underway here in the UK. This is both exciting and necessary in moving forward our thinking so that we can have a significant impact on the global problem of pain.
Mick Thacker has been an enormous influence upon my work and beyond, and in fact I blame him entirely for my obsession with understanding pain! I still recall the lecture he gave when I had my ‘aha’ moment, realising that there was a way forward. Not looking back since, there have been incredible steps forward to where we are now. Mick has had a huge impact upon so many people over the years and this continues. We have a lot to be thankful for and I am grateful for the opportunity to support the work he describes below. I believe that this research is by far our best opportunity to truly understand pain.
‘We propose an interdisciplinary programme of research that focuses on a new approach to pain based on the Predictive Processing Framework (PP) set out by Profs Andy Clark, Jakob Hohwy, Anil Seth and Karl Friston. The main feature of this proposition is that pain arises from circular influences that link the body (including a brain) with the world. This approach sees pain as an action-orientated perception that attempts to both identify and alleviate/limit the potential causes of actual, potential or ‘imagined’ danger to the self. We believe that this approach will extend well beyond the current bio-psychosocial model.
Working closely with philosophers and neuroscientists we will reframe our current understanding of pain using models of PP and will marry empirical based experiments into nociception with current philosophical perspectives. We plan to use these newly acquired perspectives to propose and plan a series of empirical studies that examine pain from the perspective of PP. The direction of these studies are likely to employ many different approaches across the (cognitive) neurosciences including human psychophysics and neuroimaging as well as the development of modelling paradigms involving artificial neural networks and related techniques allowing us to fully understand and evaluate pain and it’s impact on the person.’
Mick Thacker PhD. MSc. Grad Dip Phys. Grad Dip MNMSD. HPC. FCSP.
Senior Consultant AHP (Pain) Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust &
Centre for Human and Aerospace Physiological Sciences. King’s College London.
Pain Section, Neuroimaging. Institute of Psychiatry. Kings College London.
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, School of Health Sciences. University of South Australia.
understand pain 