Speaker: You are listening to Allied Health Podcast talking all things Allied Health with your hosts, Danielle Weedon, physiotherapist, and Clare Jones, occupational therapist.

Danielle Weedon: In today’s episode, Clare and I speak with Anjelo Ratnachandra, founder of Beyond Pain, one of Australia’s first physio private practices in pain management. Anjelo runs workshops training other allied health professionals in his unique approaches to pain management and has received numerous awards in the allied health and occ rehab industry. WorkSafe Victoria Award Treating Practitioner of the Year in 2011, and Physiotherapist of the Year in 2018 at the Australian Allied Health Awards. Anjelo’s worked in Australia and overseas and presents internationally, and he’s also the author of Beyond Pain, which has been published in 13 countries across the globe. Clare and I cover Anjelo’s career pathway in this episode. We discuss with him some life-changing events that happened when he was living and working as a physio in the uk, which led to his lived experience with chronic pain. We talk about his book, his philosophies, and the workshops he runs. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did talking with him.

Clare Jones: Anjelo, welcome to Alled Health Podcast.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Clare Jones: Now, Danielle and I have known you for many years, both from different perspectives. I first met you when you made the decision to pack up and go and work as a locum physio in the uk. Since that time, you’ve forged quite a unique career within physiotherapy. So, to kick off, can you tell us a bit about your experience to date and maybe focus on the really interesting work you’re doing in the addiction and long covid space at the moment.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah, sure. Well, Clare, that’s, uh, coming up to one month Shy 20 years ago.

Clare Jones: No don’t tell people that, Anjelo! It was five years ago, wasn’t it?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah, no, I wish it was, but yeah, it was March, 2003 and in middle of March, 2003 when I landed in the uk. So, yep. 20 years ago. Just prior to that, I graduated in 2000 as a physio and then worked in community health for the first year, in out patients as well as inpatient rehab, then worked in private practice. And, you know, in private practice as a junior physio, you do a lot of hours. You see a lot of patients and, and something that really struck was that there were some patients who would get better and others wouldn’t. And you do the same techniques and you sort of strung a chord, and say what’s going on there? Or patients you got along really well with tends to respond better to your treatment. And so that sort of sparked my interest and curiosity as to the psychology of injury. But then, with all the hours of work and working hard, and I just thought, you know, there’s gotta be more to this and that’s when I packed my bags and decided to go to the UK to do the working holiday thing. And was there for four years as opposed to the two years.

But in the UK I was very fortunate to start off working community health in neurological conditions. It gave me a broad experience and then I moved into rehab, elderly rehab, and then to mental health. And the reason why I was really interested in mental health was because of that spark from all couple of years prior. And I thought, hey, not many physios have worked in mental health. I wanna know how we can influence. And at that point it was just a curiosity thing. We are talking 2004, 2005 to look at what if we make people exercise because you tend to feel better after exercise. So we, we didn’t have, you know, a research project or anything. We just thought it would be a great idea just to test the water. So I was fortunately attached to, mental health sort of hospital, and we just used to get people every Thursdays and Fridays to do exercise. And when you talk to them after, they were in a better head space. They were more positive about discussing stuff with you.

So we knew we were onto something and from there I had the opportunity to work in a internationally renowned pain clinic. And again, for me working as a physio, you often deal with a lot of pain conditions. And I thought this was an opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary sort of care where there was psychologists, nurses, physios, doctors, OTs, etc. where I could learn from them as well. I guess I was very fortunate that I’ve got a bit of a learner mindset, so I’m always wanting to find what else don’t I know? So that really set me up and gave me a really nice grounding as to looking at the biopsy, psychosocial aspect of pain. And so from there I just grew my knowledge and interest in pain management.

And then when I came back here, I thought, I want to try something different because I know there’s lots of workers with injuries. My dad had a work cover injury back in the nineties, and then, you know, LinkedIn with, Danielle to get a job in a rehab. Which was my first exposure, and that was back in 2007. So, then I worked in a rehab and, that was really great and, but I was really still passionate about pain management and really promoting what I learned over in the uk, over here because I just felt in Australia or in Victoria, wasn’t as knowledgeable in that pain space.

So subsequently I started running workshops and working more and showing greater interest. And then obviously, we just grew beyond pain, organically to an interdisciplinary team. We’ve got OTs, psychs, rehab counselors, physios, eps, and we’ve got three clinical pharmacists on our team as well. And we do a fair bit of work across, Australia, predominantly in the life insurance income protection, but also CTP in New South Wales, Queensland, and WorkCover and the comcare sort of areas, and we’ve got private clients obviously, but yeah, more recently, we’ve been really working in the last 12 months or so in the long covid, space. Just because there was a need. We’d always done telehealth. So we, we’ve been doing telehealth for over 10 years because, my philosophy is we shouldn’t discriminate people in regional rural areas just because of their distance. We shouldn’t have to ask them to move to a city to have treatment. And I felt that while face-to-face is great and ideal, we could still provide stuff and strategies for people in rural regional areas in the comfort of their own home.

So we started doing telehealth back in 2008, 2009. And you know, COVID really brought that to the forefront, but we’ve been really working with the chronic fatigue, long covid space, looking at pathophysiology and how physiotherapy and other allied health practices can come up with suitable strategies to help these people. And also in the addiction space. You know, if you look at any sort of chronic illness often there’s some sort of underlying, or concurrent addictive behavior. Doesn’t necessarily mean  the diagnosed addiction, but, you know, we saw it in Covid, you know, every, every time you talk to someone, they’ll be like, I can’t wait till Friday afternoon where I can have a glass of wine. Like, why do you have to have a glass of wine to enjoy a Friday afternoon? So it can organically and, and from a social perspective do up. So, yeah been doing some work in that space looking at, you know, how can, from a physical functioning perspective, could we influence and manage those sort of behaviors. And also looking at the fatigue and the disoautonomia, uh, that’s associated with long COVID.

Clare Jones: Interesting. Now just going back to your working holiday in the uk, it’s fair to say it wasn’t exactly what you’re expecting in a lot of ways. In fact, now, now that you’ve let the cat out of the bag and said it was 20 years ago since we were first touch in the twenty-one years, nearly twenty-two years, I think now, since we’ve been working with therapists wanting to work in the uk, no one has had the experience that you had over there Anjelo. So, can you tell us a bit about that story?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: I think I spent more time or equivalent time in hospital as a patient, as I did working. I guess the main in incident or event that sort of made me someone with a lived experience rather than just a therapist working was on the 23rd of June, 2006. I was sitting at home in my share house in East London, ironically I was working in pain management at the time. I was hit with a petrol bomb and set a light in a case of mistaken identity. So, it was a Friday night. It was during the world Cup in Germany. I remember it was a boring game. Wasn’t anything interesting. I was just eating ice cream, sitting at home and minding my own business. When someone broke the window and threw a petrol, a malt of cocktail at my head, and I put my arms up to, uh, shield my face, and the, the cocktail bottle basically ricocheted off my hand, hit the back wall, and it smashed. And I got showered in petrol and then they set me a light. So, mm-hmm. They were meant to get the house two doors down. In a strange sort of twist of fate, I’m, I’m glad they got our house, uh, because the house they intended had an eight year old girl and her mom, and not even the person that they wanted to attack. So, yeah, I’ve had significant burns to both my hands. And you can imagine as a physio you’re thinking, wow, you know, both my hands, left side of my face, my left ear was burned down to the cartilage. And so yeah, I had to put the fire out. And as you know, in London, there’s not enough space to stop, drop and roll, which we, we were taught growing up. So I had to actually use my hands to put the fire out on my body. And then somehow I had the nerve to run upstairs into the shower and tell the girls who I was living with at the time to get out and call the fire bridgade.

So, and subsequently stayed in hospital, in an acute burns unit for about a week and a half, and then outpatients for about six months, going three times a week for my morphine injections and wound care. And then subsequent, skin grafts, uh, on my arm. So yeah, there was a fairly big journey there. And eight months prior to that I had a spontaneous pneumothorax. Which I didn’t really fit the criteria at the time. So, you know, as therapists, we are hopeless at self-diagnosis. So I, I thought it was just a muscle strain in my ribs. Intercostal muscle strain will be about right because the criteria for a spontaneous pneumothorax is tall, thin, redhead teenagers. Yeah, that’s not me. So I went to work for five days.

Clare Jones: I love that part of it Anjelo, that you just thought you’d push through that pain, that you just keep going.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Well, I had to go to Budapest with some friends. Couldn’t miss out on that, Clare. So, you know, I was actually convincing myself I was getting better, although I was shortness of breath. Anyway, I did see a doctor and she said, oh, it doesn’t look good. I think you should get checked out. I said, I’ll come back when I get back from holiday . So I flew and then flew back within about 72 hours, which is the worst thing you could do, obviously. And so my left lung was collapsed, to less than 40%. They gave me 48 hours to live. I was just very lucky that I went and got it checked out. So I ended up in a London chest hospital in the Royal London in total for about five weeks. They had to do a pleurectomy, which is basically going in scraping the, uh, the pleura behind my left lung and then blowing my lung up and sticking my left lung to my left ribcage, which is how it is today. Um, so yeah, so that’s really my experience.

Clare Jones: With the collapsed lung. Anjelo, did you experience chronic pain from that?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: I did have symptoms and it was quite unique symptoms which we hear of with chronic pain conditions. So where my scar line is on my left side of my back, I had an equivalent pain and like, yeah, almost like a broken glass, sort of really hypersensitive sensation on, on the right hand side. So, you know, it didn’t make sense that I was grabbing up my right hand side yet the scar was on my left. So I had some chronic pain. And I think that just got exacerbated with the burns. And then subsequently came back to Australia.

Danielle Weedon: Both big events that really meant your professional and personal life intersected.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Oh, a hundred percent. And it’s in a way, like for me, I’d sort of take it like sometimes you gotta walk the talk and in a way this is an opportunity for me to really test out whether what I was taught was best practice is actually gonna work because I didn’t wanna be a liar, essentially. So no, it really made me put in place what I was taught and from an occ rehab perspective, you know, I was at interest because my manager said, you know, and you’ve been off work for a while, let’s get you into it. And she made me do the PD calendar for the team, from working from home. And it really gave me a sense of worth. And it really, you know, I was at a bad place. I was getting counseling for the trauma and so on and so forth. That was one of the key things that changed my outlook in terms of getting my life back. So I was really passionate about that and that’s why I wanted to explore a rehab when I got back.

Danielle Weedon: Yeah, yeah. Having purpose, having a reason to get outta bed. You’ve touched on it already, but what did your rehab journey and recovery look like? I know you said you had spent sort of six months, in and out of hospital in terms of rehab and then you headed back to Australia, but, do you think you’ll ever achieve pre-accident function?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Uh, that’s an interesting question because I think my philosophy is that the function you have is a function you’re meant to have because like a pre-accident function, I could almost argue I’m better than that. You know, maybe I would not have been an author or you know, working in this space. Maybe I wouldn’t be presenting as, because people are engaged with the story. So, you know, can I do the hands-on, 30, 20 patients that the private physios do these days? It’s crazy. Uh, probably not. because like my hands are in ice water after a few patients where they just feel really tingly. So I’ve obviously got some sort of hypersensitivity, but that said, my career evolved anyway to pain management. So, and looking at chronic illness management, mental health is area of interest. So I would say, yeah, it’s at the same or, better functionally if I wanted to go back and do, full-time, hands-on private practice I couldn’t do it straight away. I would need to obviously pace myself up as I did in my life achievements, I guess.

Danielle Weedon: It’s the psychological approach as well, right? You can look at, a different ability in a certain way

Anjelo Ratnachandra: You gotta be able to adapt, I think. One of the quotes in the book talks about that. So, I think it’s the ability to see the situation and then you decide for yourself. It’s a bit, it’s a bit like a movie. You know, you are the director and the, the, the script writer or the screen play writer you’re in charge of how your future’s gonna look. So, you know, it’s not easy. I’m not saying that it’s easy to take that because some people go through some horrific things. And so it’s never gonna be easy, but I think it’s important to know that you’ve got control.

Danielle Weedon: Yeah agree. And, and you and I have known each other for even longer than it was 20 years ago because we went through uni together. You were the year below me, in age, so you’re fairly young compared to me. And then I’ve obviously seen your career journey because we worked at the same time in the uk. I’d already moved into recruitment there when you were there. Yes. We had some fun Amsterdam trips as part of the recruitment company we worked for.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Glad we both still remember that.

Danielle Weedon: Yeah. I, I said to Clare the other day, Angela was always the great photographer. You had an amazing cannon SLR and used to take all the photos. But so I’ve seen you working in the UK and then when you got back, obviously we helped you get a role in the, occ rehab sector. And we’ve known each other, for a long time now. So when you decided to move into a rehab and the area of health, which as you said, overlapped your interest in psychology and physical, therapy, have you got any other tips for physios who might consider a move into this area?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: I think it’s a great move. This is my personal opinion, but I think that you become a better therapist having worked in occ rehab because occ rehab allows you to see the full picture, uh, anyway, allowed me to do it. And even in our current practice, you know, a lot of our guys, we expose them to some sort of occ rehab experience, although they might be working more clinical, or wellness. Because I think it gives you a holistic approach. I think occ rehab is really powerful in teaching people communication techniques and how to adapt to certain circumstances. You know, you gotta talk to an insurer different to say an injured worker or an employer, and so on and so forth. And I think those skills that us physios probably aren’t really taught at university. You can get that naturally in occ rehab. So I would absolutely encourage anyone to do occ rehab, even if it’s not their career path moving forward. I would hope that certainly at universities, at an undergrad level, that occ rehab is really encouraging in terms of placements, I think there’s definitely a place for that.

Danielle Weedon: Yeah, and you’d already had that pain management interdisciplinary sort of team approach, which probably, in the past I think therapy’s always been really siloed in what we do, but I think really in any clinical setting, it probably should all always have an interdisciplinary approach. Because you can’t pull out the psychosocial factors from any physical injury all the time anyway.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: No, not at all. One of my favorite quotes is Aristotle who said, treatment of the part should never be attempted without the treatment of the whole. That’s the era of our ways, the separation of the body from the soul. And he said that 2000 years ago. And we’re sort of coming to learn to, you know, still learning that now. So absolutely. I think, you know, really having that interdisciplinary as opposed to multidisciplinary, you know, multidisciplinary teams who have now evolved to interdisciplinary is about having that common goals, client-centered goals as opposed to discipline specific goals. You might have discipline specific goals as short-term, but the overarching goals need to be more interdisciplinary.

Danielle Weedon: Yeah. And you’ve already touched on your book, but in 2014 you wrote and published a book called Beyond Pain. You talk about it being a labor of love as well as a massive challenge. I think you said you took three years to write it. So you were working full-time and balancing personal life and writing the book for three years?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Um, had cancer, had a child in that. So two kids in that. Yep.

Danielle Weedon: I should, I should have added that in. So we could go into that separately, but can you just tell us briefly about the book?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Look, I really wanted, at that time, you know, telehealth wasn’t a big thing. We had Skype right when I started writing this book. It wasn’t great and we had internet and we started just getting broadband. And I really wanted to be able to reach other people with, I guess my knowledge and experience and some strategies that I knew helped the general pain population. And that was how it started. But I wanted it to be a very honest, authentic book. And this is a real challenge for me and I think for most therapists, is to share your own personal journey if you had one. Because you’re showing some level of vulnerability, right? Yeah. So, I had a brilliant, editor in Vicky Petrak, who’s a bestselling true crime author. So nothing to do with health. So I figured if Vicky could understand what I’m talking about, then the general population’s gonna understand and she has a beautiful way of getting the best out of me anyway.

Clare Jones: And I must say there that parts of your book do read like a true crime novel.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Oh, excellent. So you know, I would write stuff and then Vicky and I would work together, to make sure the content got the right message out. Because sometimes, you know, as a clinician you would say what you think as a clinician, but I was like, oh, that doesn’t make sense for the average person. What do you mean by that? So we’d explore that. So I had the opportunity to actually sit with her, so it wasn’t even me giving my manuscript to her, and she just editing it, we were sitting side by side and working through it. So it was a really good opportunity. But anyway, I wanted the book to have my personal journey. Because I think it’s nice for the reader to know that here’s a health professional who’s written a book about, say, chronic pain or pain management strategies, but they’ve got a personal journey as well. I think it allows people to connect and validate in a way what I’m saying. And then the middle part of the book is really those understandings, you know, like, how does pain work in the body?

You know, why do, does the weather sometimes impact my pain? What do scans really show us? You know? What sort of medications? How do medications help us? You know, should I be returning to work? You know? And what does that mean? Why is that all that important? How does the body heal itself? So all those questions that for me, I needed knowledge of in order to help me with my recovery. I thought it’ll be great to put that in. And then the third part was like an eight week program for those people who didn’t have access to us, that they could just follow with their treaters, with the guidance of their treaters that could hopefully help improve quality of life. So that’s how the book was written.

Clare Jones: Anjelo, one of the chapters in your book, in the first part of the book that tells your story is titled Thinking About Healing. And I just wanted to read a quote from this part of the book cause it was a real light bulb moment for me. You say it’s not what happens to you that counts, but rather how you deal with it afterwards. Imagine watching your team win the grand Final. At the final siren the winning players jump for joy, laugh and hug each other while doing laps of honor. Compare them with the losing side, whose players are exhausted and defeated. Both sides played in the same game and the players are equally exhausted, yet there are two very different physical responses. The final siren brought about two very different consequences for the players from the two teams, and it was the thoughts in their minds that brought about their responses, not the game itself. Anjelo, can you talk us through this analogy?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah, I think it’s more about how you interpret the situation you are in, you know, because in terms of that analogy, I mean, both teams experience the same game. But it’s the circumstance, the winning of one team and how they’re thinking about what that means to them versus the losing on the other team. So it really links in how your thoughts and emotions can link to your physical presentation. And we know that because when some people are stressed and upset, it can trigger, physical responses in the body. But then we now know with research, with exercise and living a healthy lifestyle, that can be mentally well for you as well. So I think that in terms of that quote and that phrase, you know, it isn’t necessarily what happens to you. Of course it’s gonna have an impact, but your recovery phase is determined by how you respond to that and your interpretation of what that means.

So for me, with my burns, it was like, okay. This has happened to me and I was very fortunate in a way, I guess, that I had a very Buddhist sort of upbringing where, you know, it’s the concept of shit happens. Life is full of that and, you know, it’s up and down, you know, there’s not necessarily a happily ever after. It’s about what you make of it, you know? And, and my personal journey is a testament to that, I guess, you know, with the burns, the collapsed lung, but then being successful in the book and so on, so forth. So I think it’s about the approach, your attitude towards what’s happened. Yes, of course you’re gonna have some low moments and things like that, and that’s okay.

You can’t always be positive and no one’s asking that. But I think the concept of, it’s about how you react to it living in the moment and then saying, okay, well this is what’s happened. I can’t change this. How do I want to, then traject? You know, what’s the trajectory gonna be like for me moving forward?

Clare Jones: Mm-hmm. . And just in terms of goal setting, you know, it’s interesting. The winning team has achieved their goal and they’re jumping all over the place and have got all this energy. Yet the losing team who have missed that goal can’t, you know, can’t even stand up off the field. That’s interesting psychology, isn’t it?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, it’s again, putting how much emphasis on what that goal means again comes back to a sense of meaning. You know, I remember there were like AFL players like last season and stuff saying, oh, if we lose, it’s, you know, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a game. I think there was a quote that from, and that was beautiful. It’s not that they don’t care, but there’s perspective, right? Yeah. There’s perspective and we live in a spectrum, you know. There are always some people who are better off, but there’s also people who are worse off. So we just need to recognize we are just at that point in time.

Danielle Weedon: And also, Anjelo, you talk about what your philosophies are at Beyond Pain. You mentioned as well about, goal setting, being imperative, but that intent to achieve the goal, not the goal itself.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah. Correct. So, it’s a concept that we developed at Beyond Pain because. A couple of years ago, the last 12 to 18 months has been a bit of in social media about, oh, smart goals don’t work, and they’re better than this goal. And that’s all well and good. Uh, for, for me, I think all goals are good and for us, smart goals give some level of I guess some sort of framework for someone to achieve. But I think the most important message we give them is that there should be goals of intent, not expectation. Yeah so the intention to achieve, not the expectation because that brings the pressure. We don’t need unnecessary pressure. Right. But work towards something and, and same with me, I think from a personal life. Now I did Everest Basecamp. I was very fortunate to be able to do Everest Basecamp and do Machu Picchu. But you know, my specialist told me I’ll never do high altitude stuff after my collapsed lung and my burns guy said I’ll never be able to tolerate, you know, carrying backpacks and stuff like that because of my chronic pain. So, then how come we are telling people to set goals and work towards them? You know, doesn’t necessarily have to be a time thing. You just set realistic goals and it’s, uh, intent to achieve them. If you get there, great. If you don’t, you’re gonna get the maximum outcome. That’s the attitude.

Clare Jones: And a modified goal, it’s your goal, isn’t it? You know, you get to structure the goal how you want to.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Correct.

Danielle Weedon: Mm-hmm. And when we went through physio years ago I don’t really recall there being a heap of physios working in mental health at the time. Have you seen the research and link between mental health and physical health change over the years?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Oh, a hundred percent. Unfortunately I still don’t see a lot of physios working in the mental health space. There’s more and more exercise physiologists working in there with the exercise component. I think there’s room for all us physical type therapists to do more. You know, it’s connected. You know, any physical injury will have some psychological aspects. And any psychological injury or illness will have some physical aspects it’s the mind body connection. Like, so trying to separate it is futile, I think. And that’s why you need a holistic approach, even for mental health sort of conditions. You need some sort of physical activity, structured routine, good sleep, all those things, not just the psychological or the counseling.

Clare Jones: Now on to Beyond Pain. Anjelo, can you tell us a bit about Beyond Pain and your Courses and work workshops, educating other Allied Health practitioners about chronic pain and more specifically about the workshop, Empowering Conversations and the Pain Assist Program.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah, sure. Uh, look, as I said we are an interdisciplinary team. We’ve got guys up in Queensland and New South Wales and Victoria. A lot of our work is done by video conferencing and we support local providers. So we might bring the expertise, but then we support to upscale local providers because ultimately we want our clients to be supported by their regular treaters. We also have the pharmacists on board. It has been a groundbreaking sort of approach because we are supporting the local gps with appropriate sort of medication strategies, especially in rural and regional where they may not have access to that training. So, you know, when we do a report and say, well, these are possible options for you to consider the gps love it. And so we’ve always had some positive feedback regards to that. In terms of the workshops and things, I’m very passionate about training other people as well as learning myself. I think an expert is nothing more than a more experienced student so, yeah, I sort of try and put some practical aspects.

I run a lot of zoom sort of interactive webinars now because we can still provide appropriate training. We split into breakup groups and things like that. So yeah, really giving some practical strategies. And given my experience working in occ rehab and in a clinical setting and, you know, doing other things that employer-based work, it just allows me to give a practical approach to the workshop. So we’ve got the Understanding Pain Workshop coming up in a couple of weeks. And we also run an Empowering Conversation looking at communication styles and techniques and how that relates, but also looking at what we talked about before, you know, someone’s upbringing and how someone’s upbringing can influence your communication style and your biases. So we really given insight into that. We also got another workshop called Tackling Mental Illness that we are running this year. And hopefully the COVID workshop, will be coming up too. Absolutely. So they’re sort of the workshops. A lot of ‘them are ESSA accredited as well. They’ve been really great, supportive of what we do.

The Pain Assist Program is a video conferencing program. It’s a brief intervention program to compliment existing sort of pain programs or if someone hasn’t got access to provide that access. You know that that program is an interdisciplinary one-on-one program that can be delivered in the comfort of someone’s own home. We do it via Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp, whatever the medium is comfortable for the client. Because we don’t want any resistance in accessing the service. But yeah, a lot of people love that program. You know, because we are providing a one-on-one sort of care and we are tailoring the goals and the strategies to that person, they’re not necessarily in a group setting. Not that I’m against group setting. I worked in one and it works really well. But sometimes they leave saying, okay, so how does that apply to me now, how do I incorporate that into my own life in my own home? So we allow that to occur. But yeah, and similar to the Pain Assist program, we’ve got other programs like the Fatigue Assist and the Covid Assist and the Mind Assist just.

Danielle Weedon: And most of our listeners are allied health professionals. If they want to undertake any of your courses or purchase a book or even need some support with specific clients that they’ve got, how can they get in touch?

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Yeah. Just go to our website beyond pain.com au. The book and the courses are on the shop page. So you can just order it there. I think that’s the cheapest way to get the book anyway. And, and it’s all inclusive of postage. And if you need to contact us there’s a contact us page, and we normally get to you within 24, 48 hours to see how we can help.

Clare Jones: Great. Anjelo, thanks so much for joining us and sharing your story and the really valuable work you’re doing in the mental health and chronic pain space.

Anjelo Ratnachandra: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.

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