Tag Archive for: worldview

If you are still with us and are more confused now than before, this is good. Keep in mind, it gets harder before it gets easier. Now that we have discussed some of the limitations with our root beliefs and began the discussion of shifting into a contextualistic worldview, it’s time to see what that really looks like in the clinic. Keep in mind, shifting into the worldview of contextualism isn’t introducing new philosophies, it’s simply showing the ability to adapt your philosophical perspective based on the context associated with the individual you are seeing in the here and now.

To shift into a contextualistic worldview, we must first be willing to accept and embrace uncertainty. Although this seems extremely daunting and uncomfortable, throughout this next blog post I will discuss ways you can improve your confidence by instilling a thing we like to call ‘confident ambiguity.’ It means having the confidence that you know certain directions or paths to head down while still being open to the idea that there are literally thousands more options available. To develop confident ambiguity, it is pertinent that we utilize a process-based framework.

Process-based theory has been discussed heavily by prior experts such as Steven Hayes and Stefan Hofmann. Most of their work can be found in the writings associated with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Relational Frame Theory. Expanding upon their work, Dynamic Principles took it upon themselves to utilize their successes and explore ways it can be applied in physical rehabilitation and pain. Without getting too much into the weeds of how this is accomplished, you can read extensively on how this was performed through many of our prior blog posts as well as our soon to be released whitepapers describing the Human Rehabilitation Framework.

With over a trillion different synapses and millions of different biophysiological mechanisms occurring daily mixed in and interacting with various psychosocial influences, there is no single model that can adequately categorize someone’s pain experience. Nearly all existing frameworks utilize a protocol-based approach that helps identify and categorize an individual into a subset of interventions, but as mentioned above, that almost seems impossible. People don’t fit in boxes and since we are all unique, we don’t do well categorized in a group.

That is why we need a process-based approach. The word “process-based” appears to be sort of a buzz word for many clinicians currently, yet there are very few frameworks that exist that are actually process-based, none of which are in the physical therapy world. Many frameworks such as Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT, AKA McKenzie), FAAOMPT frameworks, Applied Functional Science, Certified Movement Links Specialist, Movement System Impairment Syndromes, and many more may claim they utilize a process-based approach, but in actuality are just larger protocol based decision makers. Also, it may be important to note that all these frameworks were built in a mechanistic worldview and despite their willingness to move towards a more BPS model, their theories become too incoherent because they have yet to address where their root beliefs remain. For MDT, it started in the discs, for others, it’s all about the muscles/fascia, and for some it’s all about these dysfunctional movement patterns (whatever that means).

To be truly process-based, we must first move away from reductionism and acknowledge that with every intervention we employ, we are constantly interacting with multiple processes involved in one’s network. There are now over 70,000 different ICD-10 codes and we use these specific diagnostic labels to categorize people and group them into a set of interventions. People don’t fit in boxes, they are all too unique to be reduced down to one or a few specific labels. What happens if someone has more than one specific diagnostic label? If someone is dealing with neck and low back pain, should we reduce the neck down into a tissue dysfunction and the low back into a stability impairment? Many may believe that’s what process-based means, but instead you are merely using two different sets of protocols and adding them together.

With nearly 20% of people experiencing chronic and complex pain, we have to do more. Most of them are feeling broken and have had a thousand different rules created from so many providers. Don’t bend over too much, no twisting, be careful with walking too far, your hips are weak, your upper shoulders are too tense, you have dysfunctional patterns all over you. Algorithms, flow charts, and categorization are just not going to cut it.

In our Human Rehabilitation Framework, we describe processes as the following:

“Processes of therapeutic change are the dynamic functional collection of overlapping and interconnecting mechanisms operating at multiple levels and dimensions that are changeable and interact in an orderly manner accounting for history, time, and the diverse contextual factors involved in a meaningful outcome.”

We have identified nine different processes that are flexible and can allow us to continuously adapt based on the CONTEXT involved with every encounter. This allows us to address multiple body parts, specific individual needs, and create endless opportunities to engage with our clients. Put simply, it’s up to us to learn about each unique experience to figure out what sort of processes they may be stuck with and provide strategies that can potentially get them unstuck. This may very well entail some of the many criticized interventions such as core stabilization or manual therapy, but we aren’t performing them to “stabilize the core” or the “rub out the issue.” We may be performing them to engage with attentional and social relational processes that ties in with the education we are providing that ultimately helps our client build ownership in managing their conditions.

To dive into each of these processes is not within the scope of this blog piece as we have several pieces of coursework that do that. However, my original intent of this series remains the same, which is to help you recognize that most of our current theories are extremely flawed and until we step back to explore what worldview we are living in, we are not going to move forward. Philosophies such as enactivism and dispositionalism sound promising, but if we apply them in a mechanistic worldview, we are only going to make the same mistakes we did for the BPS model where it becomes lost in translation. Having the ability to zoom in and zoom out in a unified and coherent manner while being able to understand the functional context involved with each situation is the path we need to move forward towards, and engaging in process-based therapy helps us do exactly that.

I understand this material can be dense and difficult to comprehend, because it takes a long time to actually shift your beliefs especially when society expects us to live in a mechanistic world. But by being a little more curious and challenging where your root beliefs stand, you may find that through time, it gets a little easier to deal with all this uncertainty. You may even recognize that you are finally developing some confident ambiguity.

 

If this series left you with more questions than answers, good, because there is a lot more to come, so stay tuned…

When it comes to the science of pain, I would say that I remain agnostic about many of the interventions employed in rehab. Social media often displays a dichotomous view where people are either for or against certain interventions, however, when I post content, I only challenge the thought processes we have behind those interventions rather than the intervention itself.

Many researchers and publications have been saying for years that the context and complexity involved with what we call the human experience is far too ambiguous to be able to predict with high precision that we know the solution to one’s problem. This definitely creates uncertainty.

To become comfortable with uncertainty means embracing the fact that you will never be fully capable of comprehending the totality of evidence that has been compiling over the past millennia. This feat is so far outside of our current scope of knowledge that we can’t even begin to imagine the type of information we don’t know we don’t know.

In turn, there appears to be this pervasive nature of individuals opting for reductionist models and lines of thinking to help make sense of their thoughts. To find comfort with our reasoning, we then cling to others who share similar views seeking confirmation that our theories are most certainly true.

Problems exist in this mode of knowledge because when it comes to complexity, it’s hard to reconcile what is actually true. Circling back to the interventions we perform, one thing that seems to be ubiquitous is that most people get somewhat better or will regress back to their average over time. What is difficult to understand and is why some people are able to improve far more significantly than others despite similar courses of treatment.

Again, we can theorize all we want, but for there to be any validation to the theories we create, it must have adequate scope, depth, and precision remaining consistent over time. For example, if we use the theory that the body is like a machine, this is based on a mechanistic worldview. For this to be true, we will have to see a linear progression of tissue degeneration with more active people showing significantly more degeneration. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. As our knowledge improves and we find that active people have better looking joints than their sedentary counterparts, it pokes holes in the original theory, and one cannot adequately explain why that may occur. This becomes an incoherent way of thinking as the theory says one thing, yet what is observed appears to be different.

Since medicine has been derived from a mechanistic worldview stemming from Descartes theories of dualism, most theories formulated today hold similar mechanistic perspectives. This draws us back to the belief that our bodies are like a machine creating the idiom commonly referred to as ‘wear and tear’. Mechanistically speaking, it makes no sense to describe our bodies like a machine that will only break down when there is solid evidence of one’s ability to adapt based on the context surrounding their unique history. Without context, it’s hard to understand whether someone’s tissues will degenerate to the point they become problematic.

As research continually evolves, pain science enthusiasts have recognized the many flaws in these theories, so they decided to create new ones. Although this sounds good in theory (pun intended), the new theories that are replacing the old theories are still viewed in a mechanistic worldview. Instead of thinking of our bodies like a machine, we moved into the neurocentric idealism that our brains are the machines that can be controlled. Replacing one reductionist model based on a mechanistic perspective with another reductionist model based on another mechanistic perspective is like the definition of insanity. We keep doing the same things repeatedly thinking we are going to get different results. Our failure to become aware of and understand where our beliefs are rooted only hurt the forward progression of where medicine needs to transition.

So where do we go from here? Existing models have been proposed over the past few decades calling for such change, but many people become lost in translation with how they interpret those models. Opinion pieces and different perspectives continue to get published criticizing the nature of how we interpret these models with suggestions to move forward towards newer philosophies that give clinicians a different model to understand the complexities of dealing with pain. But we don’t need another model. We don’t even need another philosophy to show us a better way to understand and explain pain.

What we need is to take a HUGE step backwards. So far back that we explore what worldview we are living in and where our beliefs are rooted. As mentioned earlier, medicine was founded within a mechanistic worldview believing the body was a machine. We have made some progress in the 21st century recognizing and acknowledging the limitations that exist with mind-body dualistic perspectives, yet we replaced all these old theories with the neurocentric belief that the brain is a machine that can control everything. We didn’t actually change our root worldview, we just shifted from one perspective to another with a very similar reductionist thought process.

Now before I go on criticizing the mechanistic worldview, I would be remiss to acknowledge all the benefits that have occurred because of it. It was because of this worldview and its associated beliefs that the field of medicine now has the capabilities to prescribe certain pharmaceuticals and perform surgeries that are lifesaving. If you are a surgeon removing a cancerous tumor from the spinal cord or a physician prescribing the appropriate life-altering medication, you may not care as much about the context involved in the situation and instead do what is necessary to fix the mechanistic problem the individual is dealing with. But that doesn’t mean this worldview applies to everything in medicine. When it comes to pain, it is time we recognize that we can’t live in a mechanistic worldview and adequately treat it.

Stay tuned for Part II where we discuss the importance of shifting worldviews to better understand and apply interventions associated with pain.