Emily Walker
@emwalkerexphys.bsky.social
PhD Candidate at UNSW and NeuRA | Conducting a process evaluation of a CLBP clinical trial | Passionate about complex systems, equity, social and political determinants, qualitative research, underrepresented populations and intersectionality 📚
I was delighted to be invited to write a clinical update as part of the International Association for the Study of Pain’s 2025 Global Year 🌏 Check it out 👉 journals.lww.com/painrpts/ful...
journals.lww.com
One-Page Patient Fact Sheets for Low Back Pain in Primary Care url:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2836549?utm_source=bluesky&utm_campaign=content-shareicons&utm_content=article_engagement&utm_medium=social&utm_term=071825 📚
World Physio Congress 2025 highlights: -Seeing physios in diverse settings, esp crisis/emergency settings -Seeing the knowledge from physios in Gaza on trauma-informed care -Emphasis on multi-level determinants affecting health Great to connect with clinicians from the Critical Physio Network 💪
In critical physiotherapy the “human” is deeply political: humanity is embedded in history, shaped by it and myriad social forces, & conditioned by relations of power in which some are able to assert their status & privilege at the expense of others. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37688439/
Critical physiotherapy: a ten-year retrospective - PubMed
Critical physiotherapy has been a rapidly expanding field over the last decade and could now justifiably be called a professional sub-discipline. In this paper we define three different but somewhat i...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Tackling health inequities requires widening our lens to understand how jobs, working conditions, education, housing, social inclusion & even political power influence individual & community health. One way to understand what Marmot calls the “causes of the causes” is to ask new questions:
Australian Pain Society Conference done! #AusPainSoc Presented on the mechanisms of patient-led goal setting & pain science education ✅ Received updates on IASP 2025 Global Year through Australian lens (ISSHOOS published soon: www.isshoos.org) Informative work at the 'rural realities' workshop
Figure 3. Potential avenues to apply a multilevel conceptualization of social aspects of pain to advance equitable pain prevention and management. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38897311/
Figure 1. Examples of contextual intersectional health inequities. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38107758/
Social is often positioned as a separate domain to people's health, a binary of medical/psychological, or conflated with individual. Social isn’t just personal context, but also social structures, ideologies & institutions that privilege interests of dominant groups www.jpain.org/article/S152...
Chronic Struggle: An Institutional Ethnography of Chronic Pain and Marginalization
The Lancet published a special issue in 2021 introducing a call to “re-think chronic pain”.24 The premise for this call was at least partially based on the growing awareness that rising social inequit...
jpain.org
I had the pleasure of presenting at the New Zealand Pain Society Conference this week 😍 I spoke about the complexities of clinical practice when providing evidence-based practice to people with chronic low back pain & linked them to the conference theme of “equitable outcomes in pain care”
When someone receives treatment for a MSK pain condition - the total treatment effect encompasses the specific effect of the treatment, contextual effects, and non-specific effects. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
What determinants play a key role in the lived experience of persistent pain and recovery? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Political, economic, and cultural systems regulate social relations at a societal level, and define resource distribution, impacting pain prevalence and treatment access. Ideas are organised into three broad categories; justice, access and knowledge www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reframing pain care: An equity lens on psychosocial and behavioural interventions
This review critically examines psychosocial and behavioural interventions for chronic pain through an equity lens. We interrogate relevant literature…
sciencedirect.com
4 of the themes describe what it means to live with chronic pain & 6 of the themes describe what it means to be on a healing journey with pain. “A Healing Journey with Chronic Pain: A Meta-Ethnography Synthesising 195 Qualitative Studies” academic.oup.com/painmedicine...
“Listen to me, learn from me & hear what I’m telling you, it makes me feel like my concerns have been understood” “Provide a holistic approach to my care that is tailored & looks after my physical, mental, occupational, social, spiritual & intellectual needs” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35384928/
"Listen to me, learn from me": a priority setting partnership for shaping interdisciplinary pain training to strengthen chronic pain care - PubMed
What are the care-seeking priorities of people living with chronic pain and carers and how can these shape interdisciplinary workforce training to improve high-value pain care? Phase 1: Australian peo...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
“System (eg. biomedical orientation), organisational (eg. key performance indicators) and professional (eg. identity as expert) factors compete with person-centred rehabilitation” Great work by Prof Nicola Kayes journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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It often takes me a few goes to understand words like ontology, epistemology, positivist and constructivist…The breakdown in the paper is gold! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34457699/
