30DoS 2018 Day 22 – Lester Jones

Hi everyone. My name is Lester Jones and I am a pain physiotherapist and educator. I have spent a long time at university and in the clinic exploring human health and behaviour including 4 years of psychology and a Masters degree in pain. If I had been driven in a different way, I would have spent that time doing a PhD – thankfully I wasn’t – but now I find myself back at university doing just that with the amazing research group at Judith Lumley Centre. In my research, I am interested in the multiple dimensions of pain and how we can work with the complexity in different contexts. I was the inaugural chair of the APA National Pain Group and currently, I am on the committee for the International Association for the Study of Pain SIG Pain associated with Torture Organised Violence and War. I have also just moved to Singapore to take up a position at the Singapore Institute of Technology.

I was made aware of the CPN early on and was so pleased to read exchanges and postings from the members that gelled with my ideas about physiotherapy and health and well being! I realised I was not alone! While I am a long way from claiming to be a critical theorist I feel that my philosophy of practice aligns more with engagement with the person, culture, and community, than concepts focused on structure and reductionism which seem common in our profession.

My thinking, writing, and research have involved exploring pain – definitions, purpose and management – with the help of wonderful colleagues. I co-developed the Pain and Movement Reasoning model, a clinical reasoning tool, with Des O’Shaughnessy in the mid-2000s when we both found ourselves in London asking the same questions. We developed a tool that allowed for the dynamic quality we see with pain, where it can change from context to context, from one meaning to another at any given moment while preserving the domains that contribute to the experience – bio-psycho-social. We eventually got around to publishing it in 2014. My most recent work with Laura Whitburn has explored the nature of labour pain. This came from some extended time at the Judith Lumley Centre where I set myself a task to explore why is labour, a normal and necessary physiological process, painful?…and often very very painful and sometimes barely painful, if at all! This drew my focus to the social aspects of pain – after all, we would not express the pain we feel if it did not have a social function – so, what if pain expression and pain perception evolved together – have we underplayed the social component of pain for too long? 😉

Relevant publications:

Whitburn, L.Y., Jones, L.E., Davey, M-A. and McDonald, S. (2018) The nature of labour pain: An updated review of the literature. Women and Birth

Jones, L. E. (2017). Stress, pain and recovery: Neuro-immune-endocrine interactions and clinical practice. In S. B. Porter (Ed.), Psychologically-informed physiotherapy: embedding psychosocial perspectives within clinical management. (pp78-106). Edinburgh: Elsevier.

Whitburn, L. Y., Jones, L. E., Davey, M. A., & Small, R. (2017). The meaning of labour pain: how the social environment and other contextual factors shape women’s experiences. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 17(1), 157.

Whitburn, L. Y., Jones, L. E., Davey, M. A., & Small, R. (2017). Supporting the updated definition of pain. But what about labour pain? Pain, 158(5), 990-991.

Jones, L.E., Whitburn, L.Y., Davey, M-A. & Small, R. (2015) Assessment of pain associated with childbirth: women’s perspectives, preferences and solutions. Midwifery, 31(7), 708-712.

Amir, L., Jones, L.E. & Buck, M. 2015 Nipple pain associated with breastfeeding: incorporating current neurophysiology into clinical reasoning. Australian Family Physician 44(3), 127-132.

Jones, L.E. & O’Shaughnessy, D.P. 2014 The pain and movement reasoning model: introduction to a simple tool for integrated pain assessment. Manual Therapy, 19(3), 270-276

Links:

Email address: lesterphysiotherapy@gmail.com

Location (city/town, country): Melbourne, Australia

Current position(s): Physiotherapist/educator working in private and public clinics, and range of post-graduate learning contexts; Chair National Pain Group, Australian Physiotherapy Association

@Lester_E_Jones