Why pain management for work is different

There are many people who have completed a pain management programme, know how to do things like breathing, working to quota (pacing), relaxation strategies, distraction and exercise - but when they are asked about returning to work say ‘I can do these things at home, but not at work’.
I have many books on pain management [...]

A brief ponder

Complete opinion today…!
I’m pondering why we as clinicians can be so scared about increasing our patient’s pain levels. And why patients are so fearful of increases in pain.
I spoke with a new group of people starting a pain management programme yesterday. I told them, as I tell all the new groups, that their [...]

Making an exception - one way to soften a rule

I’ve mentioned before that one of the main problems with helping people to develop new ways of managing their pain is internal rules - things that we all learned as kids probably! Things like ‘if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well’, ‘never leave a job unfinished’..
These are great general rules, but [...]

Effects of disability - diathesis-stress

I’ve posted before on the effects of disability that make coping a challenge - today I want to cover a few more areas. My aim is not to suggest a ‘poor me’ attitude towards people with chronic pain, but instead to highlight how these demands might affect core beliefs. This is an important [...]

Useful resources: handouts on basic coping skills

Trawling through the interweb can be enlightening sometimes. What’s exciting is to see the range of resources government agencies provide. I’ve just spotted these from the Centre for Clinical Interventions (CCI) from the Department of Health, Australia.
This list of fun activities in pdf includes some social ones as well as solitary ones, [...]

Chronic pain is not a mental illness

In New Zealand at least, obtaining training in pain and pain management is fairly restricted. Two papers specifically on pain and pain management for ‘all-comers’ are run through my Department at University of Otago, Christchurch, but apart from this - I’m not sure of any others at postgraduate level. Occupational therapists have the [...]

For the visual amongst us - CB Worksheet

I’m a very visual person, I love to see what I’m doing, and I use visual imagery a lot in my language and my processing. Many of our clients are also visual - or they’re kinaesthetic - and they need to see and manipulate rather than listen and talk.
At some point while working with [...]

We’re not trained monkeys!

One time I was carrying out some work for a large organisation that wanted to train a lot of people to do some assessment work. It annoyed me for some reason, and I’ve finally hit on the problem (OK, several years too late, but never mind!). The problem was that instead of teaching principles, [...]

When you need to change tack…

There are some times when things just don’t go the way you plan…Therapists don’t very often publicise when things don’t work out, but I think we can learn a lot from these situations - and the reflection process models one of the ways that we can help patients learn from every situation too. As [...]

Why CBT? How do patients feel about it?

There are many different therapies out there - why is CBT (or one of the newer variants) the Chosen One?
I gave a few reasons yesterday -
* that people are capable of change,
* can accept self responsibility for their actions,
* that what we think and believe about a situation can affect our emotions and responses, [...]