Here at PCET we are finding that more and more people are coming to us asking for ways to help with pain that don’t involve being prescribed opioids (narcotics). Many people are finding in this time when so many doctors don’t want to prescribe opioids and when being on opioids involves pill counts, drug screens [...]
Ted Jones, PhD from the Behavioral Medicine Institute at Pain Consultants of East Tennessee, recently provided his thoughts about the use of virtual reality software to combat chronic pain in a MedScape.com article entitled "Virtual Reality "Ventures Into Real World of Chronic Pain". Here is a portion of that article: "Virtual reality (VR), already shown to [...]
by Ted Jones, PhD, CPE You may have recently been referred to a “Pearls Class” and likely you are wondering what it is. The name is not very revealing and with all the appointments you may have at Pain Consultants of East Tennessee (PCET), you may be saying “I just can’t go over there so much; give [...]
by Ted Jones, PhD, CPE You might have read a past blog post here about virtual reality coming to PCET. Well, it has now arrived and it's operational. This is an update for you on this exciting project. You likely have heard about virtual reality. It basically involves putting a viewer on your face and then [...]
by Ted Jones, PhD, CPE Most of the people we see say they are depressed. A few have had some medical professional tell them that their depression is causing their pain. Is that possible? Can depression really cause pain? Well, in our view, your pain is not being caused by your depression. But the two are [...]
by Ted Jones, PhD, CPE “Catastrophizing" is a very important factor in chronic pain. Catastrophizing is basically when someone adds unnecessary emotion to a situation. Imagine you are on an airplane and it hits a bumpy patch. If you are sitting next to someone who says “Oh no! This is awful! The plane is going down, [...]
