Q&A with Professor Lorimer Moseley

To begin, perhaps you’d like to introduce yourself and say how you first became involved in the world of pain management?

I am Lorimer. I’m a neuroscientist, which means I am interested in how our entire nervous system behaves and how our understanding of that can improve our physical, psychological or social wellbeing. In particular, I am interested in how and why we feel things – pain most obviously, but other feelings too such as fear, fatigue, anxiety, sadness, horror.

I have always been very interested in how we can use scientific discovery to change the way people understand their world, particularly in ways that might improve their lives. The most recognisable manifestation of this work has been the ‘Explain Pain’ journey, from the late 1990s to now. That is really exciting work and reflects my answer to your question – how’d I first get involved in the world of pain. I get asked this question a lot and as my understanding of myself and ‘how things work’ have changed, so has my answer to the question.

It’s perhaps best summarised like this: take someone like me, throw a major injury and seven years of back pain into it, divert me towards working in a pain management programme, then a survivors of torture and trauma service, and then offer me a PhD in neuroscience. It’s a fait accompli,
a done deal!

You’ve been at the vanguard of new and exciting approaches to pain management for over 25 years. Although now increasingly accepted as best practice, it must have been hard at first turning the pharmaceutical supertanker round. What challenges did you and your colleagues face back then and what work remains to be done?

Ha! I am not sure that supertanker has completed its 180 degree turn yet, and I can see neurostimulation tankers building up steam too!

But you are right – we are moving towards best practice care actually being accessible and delivered. There are thousands of people contributing to that – policy makers, researchers, programme developers, and of course clinicians. I am one tiny hand on the ship’s wheel. There is MUCH more work to be done.

Our research group is particularly focused on public messaging around chronic pain and on understanding how we can better serve people from disadvantaged groups.

During your academic career you’ve authored an astonishing number of papers and conducted ground-breaking experiments. Is there one achievement that, looking back, you consider to be the most influential or most satisfying?

Not really – I have loved, and still do love, so much of my work that I can’t split particular things that stand out as most satisfying. Most influential is probably the work around pain education – Explain Pain, coauthored with David ’The Truly Extraordinary’ Butler has been astonishingly successful, without having an established publisher or distribution list to power it. It sells as many copies now as it did when it was first published in 2003. What stamina! This field of Explaining Pain – or Pain Neuroscience Education and now Pain Science Education – that David and I set off, has grown to a large field of endeavour. Several people have made their research careers on it, so I guess that would be the most ‘conventionally’ influential.

And now for some ‘fun’ questions! What was your burning ambition as a child?

Well, full transparency, my burning ambition was a big problem. That was it – my ambition was to burn stuff. Highly problematic!

What is top of your to-be-read pile at the moment?

Orbital by Samantha Harper.

What piece of music is currently your ear-worm?

Well, I am sitting at the dining room table in our new house, listening to Nigel Kennedy and the Australian Chamber Orchestra do Vivaldi. It’s amazing and a great follow-up to Full Cream’s ‘Suitcase’.

Guilty secret?

Working as a truck (lorry in the UK?) driver, I accidentally packed a live baby (sleeping, concealed in a bassinet that I did think, at the time, was rather heavy for a bassinet) into a removals truck to travel the width of the Great South Land – four days behind a train. Fortunately we discovered the mistake and I rescued it, but that was a very close call.

Guilty pleasure?

Fizzy water. It’s just the best.

“Full transparency, my burning ambition was a big problem. That was it – my ambition was to burn stuff. Highly problematic!”