Library
APS Bulletin • Volume 13, Number 3, 2003
Past Presidents’ Perspectives
Wilbert E. Fordyce, PhD, Department Editor
Let’s Draw on Past Presidents’ Diverse Perspectives
Wilbert E. Fordyce, PhD
What are you doing now?
I retired 10 years ago from the University of Washington Medical School (Rehabilitation Medicine and Pain Service) as Professor Emeritus, Clinical Psychology. I am a founding member of APS, serving as president between 1985 and 1986. Today, I am primarily involved with enjoying retirement. This is my maiden voyage as an APS Bulletin department editor, and the maiden voyage for this department.
How did you get started in pain?
In 1967 and 1968, my colleague, Roy Fowler, and I stumbled almost serendipitously onto the potent effect of social/contextual feedback on pain management. It led us to put together a behaviorally based approach to selected chronic pain problems. This approach had “cognitive” elements, but it was predominantly “behavioral” in tactical specifics. My clinical and research interests in the world of pain began there. The basic format evolved in ensuing years, principally with the addition of more cognitive elements. “Cognitive/behavioral” is the common present designation.
It was a paradigm shift to consider viewing pain as also (not “instead of”) subject to influence by social/contextual factors that might be little (if at all) related to neurophysiological parameters. The task of getting that shift embedded into education and clinical practice has been arduous.
How do you view current U.S. pain research and treatment?
I identify two broad themes in current pain research, and would like to relate them to APS as a social force. The use of brain imagery to study the diverse elements of the human experience implicated in chronic pain has already made important contributions to our understanding of human functioning. This emerging technology permits direct study of the interplay of biomedical and psychosocial parameters. In years past, this was not possible.
A second theme in pain research and conceptual thinking relates to the interplay of psychological processes with social/contextual forces. The development of chronic pain cognitive/behavioral evaluation and management programs has forced us to broaden our perspectives. We have had to move beyond a too-narrow focus on biomedical or psychosocial parameters to avoid overlooking or underestimating important factors in pain management.
What’s your forecast for the future?
These two research directions have potentially critical interactive effects that impact APS members and organizational policy. We are an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary organization within an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field. We are inherently a socially and politically complex organization. Our membership has a wide range of personal perspectives. We have already had enormous impact on healthcare delivery and have attacked and shed light on one of the most vexing of human problems—pain. But there is much more bringing together that remains to be accomplished. I hope this Bulletin department will contribute to that.
APS past presidents have diverse personal and professional perspectives. We propose this Bulletin department provide a forum in which we can tap those perspectives and assume leadership for them.
There are intellectual and theoretical issues at stake. There are educational, legal, and public policy issues, too. All these shape and provide focus for our organization. In my view, a past presidents’ forum should draw on our diverse interests to explore matters that strike the fancy of past APS presidents.
Hope you will stay with us.
Please direct your comments or suggestions about this article or department to Wilbert E. Fordyce, PhD, Department Editor, at wfordyce@msn.com.
