Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix
Dr. Gardner-Nix was a Chronic Pain Consulting Physician, Department of Anaesthesia, Pain Clinic, St Michael’s Hospital until 2018, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anaesthesia, University of Toronto. She is also on staff at Northumberland Hills Hospital, Cobourg.
She trained in the renowned Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program in the USA in 2001.
From 2002, Dr. Gardner-Nix evolved the Mindfulness-Based Chronic Pain Management (MBCPM™) program from the MBSR program, customizing it to the needs of chronic pain sufferers. She wrote, narrated and produced meditation CDs for pain sufferers and authored the book “The Mindfulness Solution to Pain: A Step by Step Guide for Working With Chronic Pain”, which is used in the MBCPM™ courses. Thousands of chronic pain sufferers across Ontario have taken the MBCPM™ programmes, where they learn skills for changing their relationship with pain, suffering and stress, developing new “habits” which involve neuroplastic changes in the brain. She extended MBCPM™ courses to patients attending many health facilities across Ontario using the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), and, since 2012, through training other health care professionals to facilitate the courses, She has also developed and added alumni courses.
She has given many presentations on chronic pain management internationally, and has researched outcomes showing effectiveness of the MBCPM™ courses in pain sufferers for pain and stress. She established NeuroNova Centre for Mindful Solutions Inc (NNC) (www.neuronovacentre.com), which creates and publishes materials for the MBCPM™ courses, and in collaboration with the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies (UTSCS) trains, mentors and accredits new facilitators. Currently MBCPM™ courses are being delivered by a growing number of other health care professionals (including MDs, psychologists, occupational therapists, social workers) across Ontario, and in the USA. Her work was reported on CTV news in April 2013 and on CBC News in December 2012.