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Dawn Ehde grew up in a family of exercisers. Her dad was an unusual sight in the small farming town of Luverne, Minnesota, going for runs amid the corn fields. Her mother treated her daily walk with reverence and made sure her children were active, hiking in the prairie grasses of the nearby state park and swimming in the summer. “They believed in the power of exercise to manage or improve health,” she recalls.
From the time she was in high school, Ehde knew she wanted to work in the health field, possibly as a doctor or a physical therapist. “I was interested in helping people,” she remembers. “I was a curious, nerdy kid who would read a lot about different health conditions.” While she was in college at the University of South Dakota, she became increasingly fascinated with how people recover from injuries, particularly how the mind and body interact to regain function.
I’ve always had an interest in the intersection of health, psychology and behavior.
Dawn Ehde
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These days, Ehde, Ph.D., professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at UW, juggles several jobs. As a clinical psychologist, she sees patients in a neurological rehab program and assesses how neurological conditions such as MS affect their cognition, pain, mood, and overall well-being. She is the editor-in-chief for the journal Rehabilitation Psychology, the flagship publication for researchers who work in that field. And she conducts research, including a new study at the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab that is focused on reducing the impact of chronic pain for people at work on the Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (RRTCs) grant. Ehde is planning to enroll 200 people, 100 at UW and 100 at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Half will receive the intervention, which will consist of eight 45-minute sessions designed to teach participants pain management skills such as relaxation that have been adapted for use in a work setting. The control group will be wait-listed and receive the same intervention nine months later.
In her work and personal life, Ehde continues to believe that exercise is important to well-being. She works out at a gym for strength training and she goes walking or running outside depending on the weather. Ehde’s 15-year-old son is an athlete and he recently introduced her to the game of golf. “I’m not very good at it but I’m having fun learning,” she says. Ehde also practices mindfulness meditation, something she frequently encourages her chronic pain patients to do. “I figure if I’m going to recommend it, I better do it myself,” she says.
How can we use what we know about behavior and emotion to enhance well being in someone who has had a life-changing injury or illness?
Dawn Ehde
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After getting her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she pursued a master’s degree in clinical psychology and wrote her thesis on chronic headaches. Ehde did her Ph.D. work at the University of North Dakota and then she headed west to the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle for an internship in the department of rehabilitation medicine. Ehde got her clinical training in a Level One trauma center at the university hospital, and her research skills were refined by a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the National Institutes of Health.
From those experiences, Ehde decided to devote her career to the management of chronic pain in general and specifically, in people with multiple sclerosis, a neuro-degenerative disease that is often accompanied by severe pain. “Fifty percent or more of people with MS have chronic pain,” Ehde says. “For some people it’s mild. For others, it’s a disabling symptom. We want to give people the tools to manage it and better understand it.”
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