Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Science Division

We made it!
The group a few of us started in Canada in 2005 is now officially a division.

I've blogged about our little group, the CPPSG, a few times before, specifically Nov 2006, about a year after we were denied divisionhood after our first application.

We decided to keep going anyway, representing the profession as mirrored in a new way, a brand new way to most of the members that comprise it. We kept plugging along, developing a public profile. Neil Pearson engineered a magnificent set of webcasts on pain. We produced a series of newsletters of pretty good calibre, free to the public and to members of the profession worldwide. Each of our (total of six) members remained fully engaged in life, practice, and keeping our little flame lit.

It paid off, because at the end of May, just a week ago, the decision to include our group as the Pain Science Division of CPA was unanimously approved by all the official leaders in the Canadian branch of the profession.

Now the REALLY hard work starts. Yours truly will take on getting a new website together, which will be a major learning curve. Already there are lots of knocks on the door re: a series of teleconferences for fall. We're going to have our hands full, and we'll be keeping skype very busy.

We are aiming to improve the general overall level of knowledge in the profession regarding pain and how to treat it, when to not try to treat it manually, how to understand it, what to tell patients about it. There has never been an official physiotherapy division in Canada that coalesced around a ubiquitous symptom before, or around delving into what pain means. Instead, physiotherapy divisions have usually coalesced around a type of treatment or a specific patient population or a segment of human anatomy. We are the first division to have taken on tackling the essence of why physiotherapy exists in the first place - to help people overcome their pain and suffering, and try to help us all get better at it as a profession at the same time; understanding pain much better, by studying, learning and teaching a deeper model, also as a profession.

Wish us well.

One little drawback is that we won't be able to produce public newsletters anymore, for awhile. We have to become inner-focused, membership-focused, to get our work done within the Canadian branch of the profession. But we still have a commitment to the public and to physiotherapists worldwide, so I envision a day coming when we will start to produce publically available newsletters again.