Neuro Orthopaedic Institute Australasia (Noigroup) is a privately owned education provider and publishing house working predominantly from an office in Adelaide, Australia, and more recently – New York, US. The company prides itself in its reinvestment in education and clinically based research and Noigroup Publications has grown from the demand for resources to support this emerging research.

Now entering its fourth decade, Noigroup manages highly qualified instructors, on all continents, presenting the latest in pain science to multidisciplinary audiences. Noigroup’s faculty members are active in many conferences, university programmes and other postgraduate education sessions.

The essence of Noigroup
Their vision is to seed ‘healthy notions of self through neuroscience knowledge’ worldwide. There are currently five critical conceptual change issues which underpin this:

Injury or disease does not mean that you feel pain
The nervous system moves and stretches as we move
Pain, stress and performance are outputs of the brain
Knowledge and movement are the greatest pain and stress liberators
Nervous system plasticity gives new hope and technique
The biopsychosocial approach, or the merging of the biology of human pain, stress and performance with the psychological and social environment, is the basis of the Noigroup educational philosophy. It is essentially ‘scientific holism’. Derived mostly from British science, the approach is best typified by Wall and Melzack’s (2005) Textbook of Pain.

Noigroup also espouses strong clinical reasoning strategies, again arising from British critical thinking and later, Australian manual therapy.

Assessment and management of the physical aspects of the nervous system and brain sciences with a focus on neuroplasticity – particularly how the brain represents our body – is an important focus.

Overall, the nervous system is a remarkable, mobile, complex, plastic and changeable organ, and this impacts on both acute and chronic injuries and disease. The Noigroup education system covers acute and chronic musculoskeletal, central and peripheral, and neuropathic pain states.

Challenges for Noigroup
Chronic pain and stress are experienced by approximately 20% of the global population. The cost is huge and dollar/pound/euro figures do not cover the impact on families and loss of creativity and productivity and its social impact.

Despite overwhelming evidence for biopsychosocialism, biomedicalism (ie. pathoanatomical searches for a singular cause for chronic problems) persists. The public still seeks a passive answer for many problems and active answers are not often provided. In the health domain, therapeutic education is underestimated. Chronic pain and stress are at epidemic levels, yet in the past epidemics have only been altered by education. Many problems such as chronic pain and stress are still ‘off the radar’ in terms of health professional, business and government understanding. Noigroup is actively engaged in these challenges on a daily basis.