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Coursera

Pain Neuroscience Foundations For Chronic Pain

via Coursera

Overview

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Develop a modern, evidence-informed framework for understanding persistent pain. This course distinguishes pain from nociception and introduces nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic pain mechanisms without reducing a person’s experience to a diagnostic label. You will examine how sensitization, neuroplasticity, context, expectations, learning, and protective responses can influence pain. The course also challenges overly simple explanations based on structural damage, muscular tightness, or faulty posture. You will learn to communicate pain science without dismissing symptoms, increasing fear, or promising a single solution. Later lessons examine how touch, movement, and the therapeutic interaction may modulate pain and how temporary relief can support meaningful activity and self-management. Through reflection and case-based application, you will practice observing, asking questions, interpreting cautiously, choosing proportionate responses, and reassessing change. By the end of the course, you will have a practical pain-reasoning framework for education, movement, appropriate hands-on care, monitoring, progression, and referral.

Syllabus

  • Module 1: Entering the Modern Pain Framework
    • Introduce a modern way of understanding pain that moves beyond a damage-only model while treating every person’s pain as real, meaningful, and worthy of careful attention.
  • Module 2: Understanding Pain Mechanisms
    • Compare major pain mechanisms, separate duration from mechanism, and examine how context, modulation, and sensitization can influence pain processing.
  • Module 3: Reframing Structure, Tightness, and Posture
    • Apply the pain framework to common explanations involving structural damage, muscular tightness, and faulty posture while replacing certainty and blame with proportionate reasoning.
  • Module 4: Applying Pain Science to Hands-On Care
    • Examine how touch, movement, context, and expectations may influence pain while distinguishing temporary modulation from structural correction.
  • Module 5: Course Integration and Summary
    • Consolidate the course into a practical pain-reasoning framework and prepare learners to apply it through communication, movement, monitoring, and professional decision-making.

Taught by

Niel Asher Education

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