Deb Wareham APAM is a researcher and postdoctoral fellow in the Spinal Pain Research Centre at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the recipient of a 2024 PRF Seeding Grant for her research exploring the effectiveness of swimming for combating chronic low back pain. 

Low back pain remains stubbornly difficult to treat, with available treatments generally producing only modest short-term improvements for people with chronic non-specific low back pain. 

An editorial in the October issue of Journal of Physiotherapy proposes that one way forward may be to rethink how we understand pain itself, using an emerging neuroscience framework called active inference.