Call for Papers
Pain Medicine is planning an interdisciplinary Special Issue on meaning in the context of pain. Guest editors are Dr Simon van Rysewyk, Dr John Quintner and Prof Milton Cohen.
Special Issue Themes and Sub-Themes
Including, but not restricted to, the following:
- Common experiential meanings of pain in different contexts
- Chronic non-cancer pain or cancer-related pain
- dupuytren’s
- Pain in special or vulnerable groups
- Pain and mental illness
- Pain and substance abuse
- Pain and fatigue
- How meaning modifies the experience of pain
- Pain and personal identity over time, including stigmatisation
- Family meanings and the experience of pain (e.g., “psychosomatic families”)
- Perceived meaningfulness of life, including suicidality
- How symbolic manipulation of meaning (e.g., verbal instruction) can change pain experience
- Perceived meaning of different types of medical treatment
- “Catastrophising” and “fear-avoidance” as expressions of meaning
- The limits of meaning: when no meaning can be given to an experience of pain (e.g., “medically unexplained pain”)
- Coming to terms with “pain acceptance”
- Therapeutic implications of meaning
- Similarities and differences in meanings of pain between the person in pain versus observers
- The influence of meaning on pain scale ratings
- Implications of meaning-making for self-control or self-management of pain
- How patients’ meanings of pain can inform treatment planning
- Strategies patients use to find meaning in their pain
- Work rehabilitation and returning to work
- Experiential research methods to study meanings of pain
- Ethnography, narrative, phenomenology, grounded theory, and single-case study methods
- Other research methods: Neurophenomenology, The Descriptive Experience Sampling Method, The Experiential-Phenomenological Method, The Elicitation Interview Method, quantitative designs, quantitative-qualitative designs
The meaning of “meaning” and clinical applications or implications of meaning in the context of pain must be addressed in detail in all contributions.
Keywords: pain, meaning, patient experience, pain management
Invited article types
The guest editors invite contributions considered in the form of the following manuscript types, in order of importance:
- Reviews (e.g., Systematic Reviews, Meta-analytic reviews, Cochrane type reviews, Pragmatic Reviews)
- Original Research (e.g., original clinical, translational, or theoretical research)
See Instructions to Authors in Pain Medicine.
Authors interested in submitting an article for publication in this Special Issue are invited to submit a 300-word Abstract by October 11, 2019, which includes the name and contact information of the corresponding author, to:
Dr Simon van Rysewyk
simon.vanrysewyk@utas.edu.au