Clinical reasoning – and cognitions

Possibly one of the most hotly discussed aspects of clinical reasoning and pain relates to thoughts and beliefs held by both people experiencing pain and the clinicians who work with them. It’s difficult to avoid reading papers about “pain education”, “catastrophising”, “maladaptive thinking”, but quite another to find a deeper analysis of when and why it might be useful to help people think differently about their pain, or to deal with their thoughts about their experience in a different way. Cognition is defined by the APA Dictionary of Psychology as 1. all forms of knowing and awareness, such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, and problem solving. Along with affect and conation, it is one of the three traditionally identified components of mind. 2. an individual percept, idea, memory, or the like. —cognitional adj. —cognitive adj. Cognitions are arguable The Thing most accessible to ourselves and most distinctive about humans – indeed, we call ourselves “homo sapiens” or “wise man” possibly because we can recognise we have thoughts! Although, as you can see from the definition above, many aspects of cognition are not as readily available to consciousness as we might imagine. From the early days of pain management, explanations about the biology of pain have been included. Indeed, since 1965 when Melzack and Wall introduced the Gate Control Theory, in which modu...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Cognitive skills Pain conditions Science in practice biopsychosocial Health healthcare Therapeutic approaches treatment Source Type: blogs