Q&A with Professor Paul Chazot

To start with, perhaps you could introduce yourself and say a little about the work of the Wolfson Institute, particularly the pain challenge academy.

My name is Paul Chazot. By day I am Professor of Pharmacology here in Durham University Biosciences Department, and am Director of Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing Pain Challenge Academy. Over the last 15 years, in addition to the development of two CNS-sparring pain therapies, I have worked with Dr Frances Cole and the amazing Live Well with Pain team, in the development of Live Well with Pain Ten Footsteps programme, and with Balbir Singh Dance Company in their Unmasking Pain programme.

I understand that some of your work involves innovative biopsychosocial and creative approaches in personal communicating experience of pain and self-managing pain effectively?

We developed the forerunner of the Live Well with Pain Ten Footsteps programme, namely the AHSN-award winning “Gabapentinoid and opioid tapering toolbox” or GOTT programme, where we increased confidence of the GPs, and brought the high dose opioid users in the test practice in central Darlington, to zero, therefore reducing the risk of deaths in a single year, 2020-2021.

Recently, we created the Fuse award-winning Unmasking Pain Creative Art programme, as a forerunner for our planned 10-creative footsteps programme. This latter programme is a co-production between artists, academics, students and pain-livers.

My main role in the LWWP journey is facilitator, “Didier Deschamp,” “water carrier,” and evaluator, blending my skills in non-invasive quantitative and qualitative methods.

Of course, what matters to people in pain is the impact these things have on their day-to-day lives and I know this is very important to you. What stories have touched you most in terms of the transformative effect these interventions can have?

The highlights of our Unmasking Pain programme for me included seeing Christine jump up in the Botanic gardens greenhouse, and dancing in perfect harmony to the music, which she has never done in her time living with Parkinsons and Pain; Hilary hopscotching out the room after just the first UP session (having requested a wheelchair at the beginning of the session) and performing her amazing poetry in public after decades of shyness; and Su getting off her pain meds, walking the North coast 500, setting up the highly successful Durham Pain café and joining the LWWP 10-Footsteps LETs team.

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

To be Franco Baresi and / or Peter Winterbottom.

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

Jack Hargreaves’ classic fishing book Fishing for a Year.

What piece of music is currently your ear-worm?

Main theme from the film “Once upon a Time in America.”

Guilty pleasure?

Genuine French Pork Rillet.

Thank you, Paul.

Paul (right) with Balbir Singh, during the award-winning Unmasking Pain project