New! Awesome! Better! (Learning a new approach)

With all the attention being given to cognitive functional therapy (and deservedly so, IMHO) it’s tempting to leap aboard the modality train and go take a course, isn’t it?

Although I’ve picked on CFT today, it could just as easily have been any of the New! Awesome! Better! therapies that hit the clinical headlines on a frequent basis. The temptation to go “Look! Shiny!” and learn about the latest thing isn’t confined to teenagers following some social media trend. Yup, even sober-sides nearly 60-year-olds like me still want to go on learning, getting better at what I do, keeping up with what’s popular…

And yet I worry just a tad when I see the number of therapies that have kicked off with a hiss and a roar but later don’t seem nearly as promising as they did when they started. Why is that? What am I worrying about?

New ideas can often get picked up without critique, as if a new idea comes fully birthed and complete. The slow decades of development, the theory that underpins an approach, and the careful ways researchers couch their conclusions can be completely ignored in the rush to show that ‘I’m up-to-date’ – and that’s a problem. Why? Because while a hallmark of an expert is in describing complex concepts in a very simple way, when we learn a new therapy we are most certainly not expert. So we’re likely to pick up on superficial and relatively black and white ideas, but fail to be aware of how these ideas are scaffolded by theory (Paas & van Merrienboer, 2020).

The difference between a technician and a professional is, I believe, in how deeply a professional will understand the theory. Theoretical knowledge teaches principles, and principles allow us to be versatile as we apply theory to different settings (Kirk, 2022). It takes time to move from superficial to deep understanding, something we expect during undergraduate learning as we develop epistemic cognition (the process of acquiring, understanding, employing and adapting knowledge to specific contexts) – and mostly, we will have had highly structured learning experiences during our training that will have made this process almost invisible to us as we learned them (Yeung, et al., 2021).

I think this makes postgraduate ‘lifelong learning’ tend towards reinforcing known assumptions – clinicians search for habitus (a set of dispositions that ‘incline’ people towards particular practices) because these fit with ‘things the way they are.’ Yeung and colleagues argue that it’s important to develop epistemic reflexivity, or ‘making strange’ the assumptions that go to make up clinical practice, so we can begin to recognise how these assumptions influence clinical reasoning. This process, however, might not be included in our professional training because it can lead to awkward questions – ones like ‘why’ and ‘what if’ and ones without satisfactory answers. Oh darn.

We can blame limited attention to epistemic reflexivity for the superficial way in which Explain Pain has been adopted. Explain Pain is a great way to begin learning about pain mechanisms, and when delivered in the way that the authors hoped it would, offers people with pain a way in to engaging in therapy that might not look much like what they’d thought they’d get. BUT too many people get the book shoved under their noses as ‘therapy’ in the mistaken hope that (a) the person’s pain will magically reduce simply because they know pain is ‘an output of the brain’; and (b) it works as a stand-alone treatment. It does not, except perhaps for fellow nerds like me.

You see, if your world view of therapy is that people are blank slates on which new information is thought to fix things, or that your job is to ‘correct’ abnormalities, and that you are the Holder of Truth, then a therapeutic innovation like Explain Pain can get picked up and bolted on to everyday practice as if it’s just another modality or technique. All the theory underpinning how and why information and learning might be useful (whether this is from a cognitive behavioural approach, or an educational one) gets lost. And the effectiveness either diluted, or at times, negated.

With CFT, built as it is on psychological principles (operant, classical conditioning, cognitive therapy, experiential learning) and delivered by confident therapists who understand movement and aren’t afraid of pain, the results are great. There is something inherently safe in being in a clinical setting with a confident clinician, exploring previously avoided movements in new and gently graded ways.

What CFT is not, however, is a recipe for correcting wrong beliefs, for pushing people into movements they’re afraid of and before they’re ready, by clinicians who themselves are uncertain, and who are looking for ‘movement dysfunctions’ or ‘deficits.’ It’s not intended to be bolted on to ‘usual practice’ which, as we can readily see from the diverse beliefs and practice about back pain in therapists in the ‘usual care’ arm of just about any RCT we care to review, is pretty messy.

To learn a new approach means making existing practice ‘strange.’ It means feeling awkward. Assumptions about ‘the problem’ and what we should do about it can get questioned. It means starting as a novice – therapy takes longer at first because we have to think harder. Our slick competence gets rattled as we can’t just reach for the things we usually (and automatically) reach for.

I’ve learned three forms of therapy that deviate a long way from my original occupational therapy practice. CBT meant I needed to learn cognitive theory, behavioural theory, how to elicit thoughts and beliefs, and link these to actions the person did. The hardest part of CBT was delaying my problem identification until I’d collected enough information to develop a formulation. Then I learned Motivational Interviewing, with its focus on values and eliciting personal reasons for change. Being willing to employ small sets of phrases and summarising then putting the question back to the person for their decision was hard after having spent so long thinking that I knew best. Finally I started learning ACT, and plunged into the complex world of understanding relational frame theory, the power of a behavioural and experiential way of learning that circumvents words (which are my natural home).

In each case, I’ve had to question the assumptions I’d developed as I delved into the theory underlying these approaches. I’ve really had to challenge myself to relate each new concept to what I already thought of as ‘truth.’ The origins of even starting to poke into ‘psychological’ approaches were embedded in my initial biopsychosocial learning that was inherent in my occupational therapy training – and I was lucky enough to have learned these ideas when they were relatively new and just being introduced by Engel. But I have had to question this perspective as well – and the way I view Engel and his work is quite different today from the way I first understood it.

Parting shot: Being attracted to a new and groovy practice is part of being a human. We’re nothing if we’re not curious (see this post from a few months ago). Let’s keep in mind, though, the need for ongoing critical analysis. Ask questions like: What are we trying to do here? What is the purpose of this approach? What are the theories underpinning this approach? What strategies or means are being carried out to achieve the results? What are the assumptions of this approach? Who benefits from these assumptions? Who is most directly affected by this? Are there alternative perspectives? What else might need to change for this to work? How would we know it had worked? – click here for one of the easily accessed critical thinking worksheets, this one from National Geographic.

Kirk, A. (2023). How physiotherapy students approach learning and their clinical reasoning capability (Doctoral dissertation, University of Otago).

Paas, F., & van Merriënboer, J. J. (2020). Cognitive-load theory: Methods to manage working memory load in the learning of complex tasks. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(4), 394-398.

Tremblay, M. L., Leppink, J., Leclerc, G., Rethans, J. J., & Dolmans, D. H. (2019). Simulation‐based education for novices: complex learning tasks promote reflective practice. Medical Education, 53(4), 380-389.

Yeung, E., Gibson, B., Kuper, A., Shaw, J., & Nixon, S. (2019). Making strange’: exploring the development of students’ capacity in epistemic reflexivity. Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation, 1-15.

How much “pain ed” do people need? And what to do when someone is not convinced…

This post has been a long time coming. There’s no doubt that giving explanations about pain mechanisms is common, and that we’ve (health professionals) been doing it a looooong time. Yes, way back to the 1970’s! In the early 1980’s when I started working in this field it was already commonplace to offer people an explanation for chronic pain (and to explain why some pains are such pains, while others bother us less – even when they involve the same degree of nociceptive input). Of course, way back then we used Gate Control Theory (GCT) to explain the distinction between hurt and harm, to explore why attention and emotion matter, and to introduce the idea of counter-stimulation and TENS: suffice to say clinicians used these metaphors especially for people with persistent pain (Katz & Rosenbloom, 2015).

Then along came Moseley, Nicholas and Hodges (2004) with a nicely-designed RCT comparing “pain neurophysiology” education with “back anatomy and physiology” provided by “trained physical therapist educators.” The results of this study showed “Education about pain neurophysiology changes pain cognitions and physical performance but is insufficient by itself to obtain a change in perceived disability.” Somehow the lack of relationship between changes in pain cognitions and physical performance and perceived disability got lost in translation, but what happened next was an explosion of interest in the effects of providing explanations about pain mechanisms.

Today, the old adage “if you have a hammer, all you see are nails” seems to apply when it comes to “pain mechanism explanations.” Everyone gets an explanation, many of the explanations are exactly the same (sometimes down to the same book being used), and I wonder how people with pain feel about this. Like the way we feel at the end of Christmas Day feasting – noooooo! not another mouthful!

Recently I was asked “how much pain ed do people need?” and my first thought was “it depends.” That’s my answer to most things in pain! Suffice to say, I think we need sound clinical reasoning before we launch into any intervention, and this means we need to understand the rationale for giving someone a pain mechanisms explanation. This post attempts to shed some light on when it might be useful.

One reason given for “educating” people (please, no! “educating” someone sounds so like an info-dump, and focuses us on what WE do, rather than on the EFFECT this information is intended to have) – one reason is to reduce pain intensity. Education, however, doesn’t have an incredibly powerful action on my pain when I burn myself doing silversmithing. The effect of information on pain may be via appraisal: if I think my pain is not a direct measure of tissue damage, then I might not be as distressed by it (and indeed, this is one of the effects identified in the Moseley, et al., 2004 study – changes in the Survey of Pain Attitudes and the Pain Catastrophising Scale showing reduced catastrophising brought about by recognising that hurt isn’t equal to harm).

As a result of not being as distressed, a person doesn’t have to communicate their fear through a number on a 0 – 100mm VAS. Because remember, we don’t have a pure measure of pain intensity and the VAS is a communication device. Pain behaviour, or what we do about our pain, is at least partly about communicating to others (Hadjistavropoulos et al., 2011; Lackner & Gurtmann, 2004) – and we all know we’d never get prescribed analgesia in an Emergency Dept with 30mm pain on a 0 – 100mm VAS!

Similarly, if we’re not as afraid of what pain means, we’re less likely to be worried about moving – so I wasn’t at all surprised to see the changes in straight leg raising and other physical performance measures. I also wasn’t surprised to see no change to perceived disability because doing functional activities in the real world is a whole lot more scary than in a controlled, supervised clinical setting. Remember this, folks, when you’re prescribing movement practices: they do not directly transfer into confidence and performance in daily life!

So if giving an explanation is about reducing distress, maybe it’s also about reducing uncertainty. Zaman and colleagues (2021) found that uncertainty hasn’t been studied as much as I’d hope and worse, it’s often studied in experimental settings where there is certainty that the pain will end, and this in turn is quite unlike me and my fibromyalgia pain which is both unpredictable and not controllable. There’s no doubt that helping someone understand that their pain isn’t a dread disease (cancer, some weird inflammatory disease, a nasty neurological – oh wait, it IS a nasty neurological thing…!) will likely reduce their distress, and might even reduce uncertainty – because at least we know what it’s not! But uncertainty remains with persistent pain because no-one knows when/if it will end, often we don’t know why it gets set off, and we clearly don’t have a handle on why it goes on and flares.

It makes sense, then, to consider pain mechanism explanations when a person 1) is not sure what it all means, 2) worries that it’s something nasty, and 3) thinks it’s both a direct reflection of what has happened to their tissues and 4) that they personally can’t do much about it.

We might also think of giving someone some information about their pain if we want to help them understand why we might be trying something like mindfulness, relaxation, stress management, or even normal movement. We can employ the little we know about cortical processes and descending inhibition, and polyvagal theory and sympathethic arousal, as well as physiological responses to movement/exercise to explain the rationale for these interventions if we so choose.

BUT we don’t have to all the time. Why? Because we can do these things anyway and help the person explore their responses in vivo! This may be more powerful than giving any kind of ham-fisted explanation, whether it be a cookie cutter one, or a tailor-made metaphor.

A few posts ago, I wrote about McCracken and Scott’s (2022) paper exploring the potential problems of making sense. This showed that sense-making can impede a person’s readiness to engage in therapy if their desire to make sense means they reject explanations that don’t fit with their understanding or when they overthink what the explanations mean. In these instances, it makes much more sense for us (see what I did then?) to help them begin to do what matters in their life than continue looking for explanations.

My guidelines for working through “pain mechanisms”?

• If the person is a geek and likes to delve into learning about their body and responses – go for it! (ie, people like me :-))
• If the person asks for information, or has questions about specific aspects of their pain or treatment
• As part of generating a case formulation, where the person and you collaborate to develop a model of what’s going on for them. As a clinician you’ll be using guided discovery to work out the processes that occur in predictable patterns, and these patterns in turn can become the focus of where and how you might interrupt them.
• After asking the person for their understanding, and there’s something in their version that’s unhelpful for their progress. For example, if the person tells you that they think a scan will uncover “the real reason” for their pain, or if they’ve taken on board an unhelpful belief that their joints are grinding bone on bone… you know the sort of thing. After asking permission to explore these thoughts/beliefs, you might find it OK to offer an alternative – but if it’s not getting in the way of them engaging in therapy, then just go along with it and use guided discovery instead.

What to do instead of explaining mechanisms?

• Focus on helping the person move towards what matters in their life, even if it doesn’t always make sense to the person. Use their experiences to guide their understanding, it’s far more powerful than any kind of external “truth”.
• Use guided discovery, drawing from their own experiences and asking them to reflect on the effect of what they do and know on their experience. For example, ask the person what it’s like when they’ve been worrying about what’s going on in their OA knee, what do they notice about their overall stress level, what does that do to their pain, what effect might that worry have on sleep or fatigue and how this might influence their pain and doing what matters.
• Offer skills to help deal with uncertainty and worries such as mindfulness (but OMG not to reduce pain, puhleaze!), attention management, and cognitive defusion.
• Always draw a connection between what you explain and what this means clinically. For example, if you want to discuss nociplastic mechanisms, what this might mean is a tendency for “normal” injuries or tissue disruption pain to hang around a lot longer. It might also mean pain spreads out a bit more. It can help explain why many medications are ineffective. And it’s useful when another clinician has suggested that because “there’s nothing on your scan, therefore there’s nothing wrong.” But tread lightly because there is SO much we do not know!

I like to draw on the principles of motivational interviewing in my work with people. Respecting their autonomy and right to decide means I need to ask permission before I give information to them. I need to have a clear clinical reason for doing so – and this isn’t “because it reduces pain” – it needs to have specific indications for this person. Understanding how and why “pain education” can be helpful is critical, and always remembering that knowing “about” something doesn’t mean it changes behaviour. I’m still not keen on spiders even though I know we have no poisonous ones here in Aotearoa, and I’m much bigger than them!

Katz, J., & Rosenbloom, B. N. (2015). The golden anniversary of Melzack and Wall’s gate control theory of pain: Celebrating 50 years of pain research and management. Pain Research & Management: The Journal of the Canadian Pain Society, 20(6), 285-286.

Hadjistavropoulos, T., Craig, K. D., Duck, S., Cano, A., Goubert, L., Jackson, P. L., Mogil, J. S., Rainville, P., Sullivan, M. J., de C. Williams, A. C., Vervoort, T., & Fitzgerald, T. D. (2011). A Biopsychosocial Formulation of Pain Communication. Psychological Bulletin, 137(6), 910-939. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023876

Lackner, J. M., & Gurtman, M. B. (2004). Pain catastrophizing and interpersonal problems: a circumplex analysis of the communal coping model. Pain, 110(3), 597-604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2004.04.011

McCracken, L. M., & Scott, W. (2022). Potential Misfortunes in ‘Making Sense’: A Cross-sectional Study in People with Chronic Pain. J Pain. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2022.09.008

Moseley, G. L., Nicholas, M. K., & Hodges, P. W. (2004). A randomized controlled trial of intensive neurophysiology education in chronic low back pain. Clinical Journal of Pain, 20(5), 324-330.

Zaman, J., Van Oudenhove, L., & Vlaeyen, J. W. S. (2021). Uncertainty in a context of pain: disliked but also more painful? Pain, 162(4), 995-998. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002106

Bias: Is pain all the same?

The topic of how we define pain, and how humans respond to pain has come up for me as I mull over the IASP definition of pain. The current (new) definition is this:

An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.

Six key notes:

• Pain is always a personal experience that is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors.
• Pain and nociception are different phenomena. Pain cannot be inferred solely from activity in sensory neurons.
• Through their life experiences, individuals learn the concept of pain.
• A person’s report of an experience as pain should be respected.
• Although pain usually serves an adaptive role, it may have adverse effects on function and social and psychological well-being.
• Verbal description is only one of several behaviors to express pain; inability to communicate does not negate the possibility that a human or a nonhuman animal experiences pain.

Now, for me the definition works fine – definitions describe and establish boundaries around what is being defined. Definitions don’t have to include all the uses of the term but instead just have to be distinct and clear, to “express the essential nature of something” as Merriam-Webster puts it.

Alongside this definition are notes about the function of pain – in other words, the notes (but not the definition) attempt to indicate why we experience pain. ‘An adaptive role‘ – in other words, pain serves a purpose in most cases and it may have adverse effects.

The question that leaps out to me now is what is the adaptive purpose of pain? This is the question that vexes many commentators who really don’t like the idea of what one author has called “maldynia“. Maldynia is thought to be “bad pain” that is severe, disabling and long-lived. I’m not fond of the word, but I do think there are pains that are not “adaptive” and these are amongst the ones that puzzle us the most in clinical practice. Things like phantom limb pain, nonspecific low back pain, complex regional pain syndrome and dear old fibromyalgia.

Back to the adaptive purpose of pain. Right now I have a cracked area on my heel. It’s quite a deep crack and it hurts every time I put my foot down. The way I’m using that information (the ‘ouch’) is to notice that yep, the crack is deep and there is tissue damage. And I am doing something about it by looking for urea-based cream and covering it while I work in the garden. I’ve (1) noticed tissue damage; (2) recognised that I need to do something about it; and (3) from experience, know that it will settle down and no longer be painful once the tissues have healed. I’ll also take care in the future to treat my heels so they remain soft as a baby’s bottom.

The metaphor of pain as an alert and action prompt serves quite well for me at the moment. And in most cases this is how we experience pain. Another example: I burned my thumb and finger on a soldering iron recently – you bet that hurt! I let go of the soldering iron PDQ, soaked my thumb and finger in cold water, then covered them until they had healed. The pain I experienced settled down after a day or so (unless I held a hot coffee cup!), and the new skin was a little tender for a couple of weeks. Again – pain served a purpose to alert me to stop doing dumb stuff, to protect the area, and to learn not to grab hold of the wrong end of the soldering iron! The metaphor of pain as an alert, call to action and learning experience again worked pretty well.

Now over the last few years I’ve had shoulder pain, imaging showed a bit of an enlarged bursa, a tiny fragment of calcification. This pain hasn’t settled down, even after I had cortisone injection AND did all the movement stuff including strength (yes – I did strength stuff!). Where oh where is the purpose or function of pain in this instance? Pain is not serving me well – I’ve been alerted, I’ve acted on that alert, nothing has changed and the metaphor breaks down.

But let’s take a look at the notes from IASP again – “Although pain usually serves an adaptive role” – usually. Usually. So there are times when pain does not serve an adaptive role. I think my shoulder pain, my groin pain, and my neck and back pain (yep, good old fibromyalgia) does not serve a function. I can’t think of any utility in having a grumpy body that really gripes about doing everyday movements like getting dressed, standing up from a chair, turning to look our the rear window of my car while I reverse down the driveway or aches in different parts of my body on different days then moves somewhere else at random.

A hidden assumption of the pain definition notes is that the “adaptive role” is reserved for those with a normally functioning nervous system, and where pain is associated with nociceptive activity, or inflammation. What if a nerve itself is damaged? What if the spinal cord is diseased or traumatised? What if there are changes to the way the nervous system processes information (we have that in every other sensory process, and in every other body system)? The experience of pain remains the same – still the same old aching, burning, gnawing, stinging sensations and the “ew”, “I don’t want this”, frustrating, totally unpleasant sensory and emotional experience as defined. The adaptive function, however? Not present.

The thing is, while I focus on persistent pain, most pain by far is not ongoing. I expect my heel crack to heal and the pain to go, and my now-slightly scarred finger and thumb are fine now.

Yes, the epidemiology of persistent pain shows that the prevalence of pain that goes on for more than three months is between 13–50% of adults in the UK. Of those who live with chronic pain, 10.4–14.3% were found to have moderate-to-severe disabling chronic pain (Fayaz, Croft, Langford, Donaldson & Jones, 2016). Similar findings for New Zealand – 16% of NZers live with pain lasting three months or more.

But given I think most of us will hurt ourselves at least once this year (especially with the lockdowns and stress of COVID19 and the economy and elections…), this means that more often than not, our experiences of pain are the acute kind. The ones that do alert us to notice what’s happening in our body, to take some kind of action, and to learn something useful from this experience.

So, while the metaphor of an alarm, alert, “danger signal” or “bear” or “beast” doesn’t hold up for all of our pain experiences, on the whole, it works. And the purpose of metaphor is “a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding” (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). Ultimately, we use metaphors like these to generate a sense of purpose for an experience that is commonplace, and the most common pain we have is a short-term, temporary one. Let’s not let my bias towards persistent pain lead me astray.

Fayaz A., Croft P., Langford R., Donaldson J., Jones G. Prevalence of chronic pain in the UK: a systematic review and meta-analysis of population studies. BMJ Open. 2016;6

Lakoff G, Johnson M. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003:36.

Merskey H., Bogduk N., editors. IASP task force on taxonomy, Part III: Pain Terms, A Current List with Definitions and Notes on Usage. IASP Press; Seattle, WA: 1994. pp. 209–214.

International Chronic Pain Virtual Summit 2020

I am so happy to be part of this virtual summit especially under our current COVID19 disruptions! It’s FREE and more than 20 speakers from around the world are talking about the things that matter in pain rehabilitation and management. I might even drop in a word or two about occupational therapy….!
Click the link and find out more! – click

Just to give you an idea of the speakers involved, you’ll get to hear from:

Professor Peter O’Sullivan

Professor Tasha Stanton

Lissanthea Taylor

Vidyamala Burch

Dr Stephen Grinstead

Kathy Hubble

Pete Moore

Prof Kim Burton

Prof Ann Taylor

Dr Adriaan Louw

Dr Shilpa Patel

Dr Saurab Sharma

Undergraduate pain curriculum: What needs to be included and what doesn’t?

One of the prominent themes in social media discussions about pain is that the subjects are not given sufficient attention at undergraduate level. The results of this omission are that many entry-level clinicians don’t have the necessary knowledge, skills or attitudes for working with people who experience pain. (As an aside, it also makes my job as a postgraduate Academic Leader much more difficult: where do I start when developing a programme?!)

Luckily there is an IASP Pain Curriculum. Actually there are many of them, for many disciplines, and they provide educators with great guidance. The problem is, however, there is so much that could be included in this kind of education – and we usually don’t have much room in a programme to include it all.

The main problems with the curriculum are: the content and levels of competency required at an undergraduate level aren’t specified; most research into this area targets postgraduates, with less attention for undergraduate pain education. Most curriculum for pain have been discipline-specific, and while a consensus on the content and desired competencies of an interprofessional pain curriculum at a pre-licence or undergraduate level has been discussed, an a-priori defined competency level across professions for the items in the IASP curriculum hasn’t been established. We need cross profession agreed competencies to allow for good collaboration. (see van Lankveld, Afram, Staal, van der Sande, 2020).

In my role as Academic Coordinator for Postgrad Programmes in Pain and Pain Management, one aspect of the interprofessional curriculum that is quite difficult to navigate is how to turn topic headings into knowledge, skills and attitudes. I’m wary of teaching directly to subject (knowledge) without accompanying this with appropriate skills and attitudes – particularly at postgraduate level, given knowledge (topics) are continuing to change over time. There’s clearly some material that is highly valued by one profession over other professions – and this is normal for every discipline! And I’m not sure we can ever hope to cover every single thing.

One consistent theme in research into attitudes and beliefs among musculoskeletal clinicians is that confidence to assess and then use information from the psychosocial domain is low (Alexanders, Anderson & Henderson, 2015; Buchbinder, Staples & Jolley, 2009; Miki, Kondo, Takebayashi & Takasaki, 2020; Singla, Jones, Edwards & Kumar, 2015). This problem is not isolated to physiotherapists, but cuts across all professions, including psychologists referred patients with “medically unexplained symptoms” (Brittni & Williams, 2020). I wondered if this area has been given sufficient emphasis in our curriculum, and most especially, whether opportunities to develop skills and attitudes that support equitable and effective pain management are developed.

van Lankveld, Afram, Staal, van der Sande (2020) used interprofessional expert panel groups, followed Delphi process, and incorporated a measure of competency (the Dublin Descriptors), to establish which of the many areas of the pain curriculum should be prioritised. This makes for interesting reading, as some of the areas considered integral to better pain management, such as the socio-political and ethical were not considered crucial, while those related to Epidemiology, Development of Pain Theories, and Mechanisms were all thought crucial. I find this interesting as stigma, equity of access to treatment, ethical use of analgesics are all areas of healthcare that directly influence what we do in treatment and in particular, what gets funded and what does not.

Developing a teaching programme from a list of topics considered important involves opinions, values, and an understanding of pedagogy. Given we live in an ever-changing information environment, I think skills and attitudes towards what is today considered “fact” need to be emphasised – how do we learn to think critically? At least part of critical thinking is reading around a topic to become familiar with current and historic models and knowledge. I also think that some of the more complex issues we need to deal with as societies are often those attitudes towards people who violate our assumptions about who is and isn’t “other”. Learning is not only about content, it’s about attitudes towards the subject matter. And some of these attitudes are buried deeply beneath community assumptions and values. To uncover these attitudes, then help people reflect critically on them and their clinical implications is, I think, one of the tasks educators need to address.

For that reason, in my 5th year undergraduate medical teaching, I ask students to undertake a case study where their job is to listen to the person with pain, identify risk factors and protective factors for recovery and return to optimal functioning and participation, and then offer individually tailored recommendations to the person, in language the person will understand. My hope is that these future medical practitioners will have developed some empathy and strategies for caring for and encouraging patients with pain to be less afraid of their pain, and more able to go on with their lives.

What should go in undergraduate training? I think we can weave all the content of these curriculum into our undergraduate training, but we should also leave students with the certain knowledge, skills and attitudes that this area of study is going to change. And that means lifelong learning about pain, people, science and self.

Alexanders, J., Anderson, A., & Henderson, S. (2015). Musculoskeletal physiotherapists’ use of psychological interventions: a systematic review of therapists’ perceptions and practice. Physiotherapy, 101(2), 95-102. doi: 10.1016/j.physio.2014.03.008

Buchbinder, R., Staples, M., & Jolley, D. (2009). Doctors with a special interest in back pain have poorer knowledge about how to treat back pain. Spine (Phila Pa 1976), 34(11), 1218-1226; discussion 1227. doi: 10.1097/BRS.0b013e318195d688

Crawford, C., Ryan, K., & Shipton, E. (2007). Exploring general practitioner identification and management of psychosocial Yellow Flags in acute low back pain. N Z Med J, 120(1254), U2536.

Cowell, I., O’Sullivan, P., O’Sullivan, K., Poyton, R., McGregor, A., & Murtagh, G. (2018). Perceptions of physiotherapists towards the management of non-specific chronic low back pain from a biopsychosocial perspective: A qualitative study. Musculoskelet Sci Pract, 38, 113-119. doi: 10.1016/j.msksp.2018.10.006

Jones, Brittni, & Williams, Amanda C. de C. (2020). Psychological therapists’ judgments of pain and treatment decisions: The impact of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 131, 109937. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.109937

Miki, T., Kondo, Y., Takebayashi, T., & Takasaki, H. (2020). Difference between physical therapist estimation and psychological patient-reported outcome measures in patients with low back pain. PLoS One, 15(1), e0227999. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227999

Singla, Mukul, Jones, Mark, Edwards, Ian, & Kumar, Saravana. (2015). Physiotherapists’ assessment of patients’ psychosocial status: are we standing on thin ice? A qualitative descriptive study. Manual therapy, 20(2), 328-334.

van Lankveld, W., Afram, B., Staal, J. B., & van der Sande, R. (2020). The IASP pain curriculum for undergraduate allied health professionals: educators defining competence level using Dublin descriptors. BMC Med Educ, 20(1), 60. doi: 10.1186/s12909-020-1978-z

The know-do gap: does social media help change things?

This post is prompted by a Facebook post from Connor Gleadhill asking “in what way is SoMe contributing to knowledge translation (KT)? I’m interested in the experience of those tagged and if anyone is aware if it has been rigorously tested. As far as I’m aware it hasn’t. Is it simply a confirmation bias arena? We are humans after all, and we curate our experience on SoMe.”

Oh such a great question and one reason I still hang out on social media!

I’ve been blogging since 2007, two years before the famous Body in Mind (who have just announced they won’t post any more content). Over that time I’ve risen to the top of the blogs, then plummeted down to my current level. Yet I still have a passion for doing this (usually) weekly post.

One reason I post is in answer to Connor Gleadhill’s question: one method for translating knowledge from journals into clinical practice is through online content. Content that’s accessible (not behind a paywall). Content that offers an opinion. Content that (hopefully) translates a-contextual information into a context more familiar to clinicians.

Is there evidence that knowledge translation occurs in this space or is it all a vast echo chamber where we listen to ourselves and pretend that everyone who is anyone agrees?

Well, in the pursuit of understanding this phenomenon, I’ve been researching the research looking at the effectiveness of one form of social media: the community of practice. A community of practice is a concept developed by Wenger yet one that has (probably) existed since humans took up tools and started learning from each other. It’s a place where “groups of people … share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” Senior or recognised “expert” members of the group provide experiential knowledge to guide junior or “apprentice” members as they learn how to … the “how to” depends on the group. In my case, it’s a group devoted to learning how to apply a multifactorial model of pain into diverse areas of clinical practice.

The group I’m part of is unusual in that it has emerged organically, not having been established artificially for the purpose of studying it. I’ve written a paper on the findings from a study of this group, to be submitted shortly. So when I talk about “effectiveness” I have to refer to artificial studies where communities of practice have been examined. One integrative review by Rolls, Hansen, Jackson and Elliott (2016) found 77 studies consisting of 44 qualitative papers, 20 mixed methods studies, and 8 literature reviews. The range of social media used was wide and included Listservs (remember them?), Twitter, “general social media” (not sure what that really means!), discussion forums, Web 2.0, virtual communities of practice, wiki, and Facebook. The clinicians involved included medical practitioners, multidisciplinary specialty group, health care professional “in general”, midwifes, nurses, and allied health professionals. The study found that:

…social media use is mediated by an individual’s positive attitude toward and accessibility of the media, which is reinforced by credible peers. The most common reason to establish a virtual community was to create a forum where relevant specialty knowledge could be shared and professional issues discussed (n=17). Most members demonstrated low posting behaviors but more frequent reading or accessing behaviors. The most common Web-based activity was request for and supply of specialty-specific clinical information. This knowledge sharing is facilitated by a Web-based culture of collectivism, reciprocity, and a respectful noncompetitive environment. Findings suggest that health care professionals view virtual communities as valuable knowledge portals for sourcing clinically relevant and quality information that enables them to make more informed practice decisions.

Rolls, Kaye, Hansen, Margaret, Jackson, Debra, & Elliott, Doug. (2016). How Health Care Professionals Use Social Media to Create Virtual Communities: An Integrative Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 18(6), e166. doi: 10.2196/jmir.5312

Heidi Allen and colleagues (2013), from Body in Mind, found that by releasing papers on social media, there was an increase in dissemination of those papers. Chan and colleagues (2018) also identified that there was much “scholarly engagement” through online interactions. There are detailed analyses of the social construction of knowledge online (Gunawardena, Flor, Gomez & Sanchez, 2016), studies of how acceptable social media knowledge translation is amongst health researchers and clinicians (Tunnecliff, Illic, Morgan, Keating, Gaida, Clearihan et al 2015), and examination of patient’s use of social media (Antheunis, Tates & Nieboer, 2013).

Social media can “democratise” information. Because social media is readily accessible across so many forms and devices, and because there is greater opportunity to interact with authors, and the numbers of people seeking health info, social media allows more information flow than journal articles or conferences. There’s always a risk in that: loud voices, those with marketing smarts, those with a punchy delivery and especially those with a controversial message will attract more attention than, for example, my long form writing on complex topics.

Reader beware must also be the motto. Info dumping a load of references tangential to the actual topic, along with little, if any, critical analysis of that material, can lead to what appears to be authoritative content, but may perpetuate unhelpful and outdated ideas.

I continue blogging because it helps me sort my ideas out. I find it helps me “construct” and assemble what I know into something I can then apply. It helps me sift through the overwhelming wealth of research pouring out of Universities and research groups everywhere around the world. As I look at the over 1100 posts I’ve written, I can see the issues I’ve pondered, and the stance I take on issues such as communication, respect, thinking before adopting a new treatment, clinical reasoning, collaboration. Many of these are attitudes towards people who live with pain.

The things I most appreciate about social media are that I have a network of people with whom I can nerd out. People who do “get it”. People who may not agree with me but who are willing to entertain alternative views. People who push me to learn about areas I wouldn’t normally. People who live with pain who inspire me. People for whom I have great compassion because of their personal stories. I have a sense of community. A real assemblage of people I can turn to when I have questions.

In answer to the question “Does social media contribute to knowledge translation?” I would say it is as effective as the readers and contributors make it, possibly more effective than attending a conference (the best part is always the social isn’t it?!), certainly more useful for generating clinical discussion than a publication locked up in a journal, and as long as conversations remain respectful and discuss ideas and not personalities, it’s an effective way for clinicians to construct knowledge for their practice setting. I’m still going to blog even if my average reader numbers in the last week were a measly 100 people.

Allen, Heidi G, Stanton, Tasha R, Di Pietro, Flavia, & Moseley, G Lorimer. (2013). Social media release increases dissemination of original articles in the clinical pain sciences. PloS one, 8(7), e68914.

Antheunis, Marjolijn L., Tates, Kiek, & Nieboer, Theodoor E. (2013). Patients’ and health professionals’ use of social media in health care: Motives, barriers and expectations. Patient Education and Counseling, 92(3), 426-431.

Chan, Teresa, Trueger, N Seth, Roland, Damian, & Thoma, Brent. (2018). Evidence-based medicine in the era of social media: Scholarly engagement through participation and online interaction. Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 20(1), 3-8.

Gunawardena, Charlotte N, Flor, Nick V, Gómez, David, & Sánchez, Damien. (2016). Analyzing social construction of knowledge online by employing interaction analysis, learning analytics, and social network analysis. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 17(3), 35.

Tunnecliff, Jacqueline, Ilic, Dragan, Morgan, Prue, Keating, Jennifer, Gaida, James E, Clearihan, Lynette, . . . Mohanty, Patitapaban. (2015). The acceptability among health researchers and clinicians of social media to translate research evidence to clinical practice: mixed-methods survey and interview study. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(5).

Informing — and knowing

Learning is perceived as a process of personal and social construction where people are actively involved in making sense of information they interact with, rather than passively receiving it (Kuhthau 2004). This cumulative and developmental process involves the whole person in thinking, acting, reflecting, discovering ideas, making connections, and transforming prior knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values into new knowledge (Dewey 1933).

I’m an educator for much of my time. When I think about it, I’ve been an educator for most of my clinical career – after all, when I helped people learn how to shower and dress again after a stroke, I was teaching. When I help someone work out how to organise their day to optimise energy levels, I’m teaching. And when I interact online in some of the Facebook groups I’m part of, I’m also teaching.

Teaching is the process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings, and intervening so that they learn particular things, and go beyond the given.

http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-teaching/

When I look at what people do for continuing education, and also how we approach helping people with pain to understand something about how their nervous system works, I think we often do a fine job of providing information. “Information is to behaviour change as spaghetti is to a brick”, said Prof Bill Fordyce, father of behavioural approaches to pain management. As clinicians and educators we spend a great deal of time working out “what” people should/need to know. There’s talk of a “curriculum” for people living with pain so the basic concepts are provided. Information is the “what” – those facts, concepts and often context-free bites of data that are gathered together into information through analysing, cross-referencing, selecting, sorting, summarising or otherwise organising them (Stonier, 1997).

Perhaps where we’re less capable is in supporting people in the process of turning information into knowledge. Knowledge is about integrating information into meaning. It’s magic to see someone have that lightbulb moment when suddenly one bit of information connects with something else the person knows and it begins to make sense!

With CPD I wonder how many of us go to a course, then walk away with our heads jam-packed with new information – then when we walk into clinic we get caught up in the everyday of clinical life, and promptly forget how that new information we’ve stored relates to what we do.

I think the same when I listen to patients talk about what they’ve been told, perhaps about pain, or perhaps about ways they might do things – and they talk of these information bites as disconnected from their daily reality.

To me, the process of developing knowledge involves processing information into personal relevance. It means that, as we learn a new piece of information, we sift through what we already know and establish how the new information might be similar to or different from what we already know. We might ponder when, where, and how this new information can apply. We try using the new information to test its utility. We talk about “what does this mean” with other people as we do this.

A community of practice (Wenger) is a “group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”. In a community of practice, people who have become expert or more experienced in doing this activity share their expertise and “knacks of knowing” – novices spend time absorbing what the experts say and do, and ultimately learn to become expert themselves. Communities of practice are everywhere and in our internet and social media-based lives, communities of practice exist virtually as well.

Clinicians often turn to online discussions to carry out their process of turning information into knowledge. Through the debates and discussions (yes, and arguments and flame wars) clinicians become familiar with new information and discuss the implications for practice. It’s common to see clinicians use Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, blogging (yes!) as ways to not only produce information but to also make sense of it.

But when I think of comparable and positive opportunities for people living with pain who are also trying to make sense of the many different bites of information they’re provided with, I’m less certain there is a good place to go to be supported in this process. Much of our clinical treatment is carried out individually, one-to-one with patient. Because pain is invisible and so many people are hopeful the experience will be temporary, meeting with and discussing information about pain and ways to live with pain are rare. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence from research showing that people living with pain feel isolated, abandoned and judged (Cagle & Bunting, 2017; Collier, 2018; Wilbers, 2015). Not the best place to be when trying to put pieces of information together.

While as clinicians, we can offer much information – how good are we at helping people connect that information with what that person already knows? How can we – especially if we don’t experience pain? What would we know of the process of going to various therapists, being told many different things, of the highs and lows of benefits and failures?

I run a group programme called Springboard. It’s a six-week programme, one session a week, with home-based “missions” people can do over the week. I’ve always thought the magic happens not when I give out information, but when participants return with their experiences and share what they’ve learned with one another. I don’t the group is simply bridging a feeling of loneliness or stigma, although it certainly seems to do that. I think the magic happens because participants share what this information means to them, when participants help one another connect a new piece of information to what they already know. Because no-one knows better what the meaning of a new understanding is than people living with pain.

So I question us all. Clinicians – do we help people connect with others who are in the same boat to learn from one another? To make sense of what we try to tell them? People living with pain, do you have ways of sifting through new information so you can work out its relevance to you? Can we bring people together – experts in living well with pain and novices learning how this information might apply?

Cagle, J., & Bunting, M. (2017). Patient reluctance to discuss pain: understanding stoicism, stigma, and other contributing factors. Journal of social work in end-of-life & palliative care, 13(1), 27-43.

Collier, R. (2018). “Complainers, malingerers and drug-seekers”—the stigma of living with chronic pain. In: Can Med Assoc.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process (Rev. ed.), Boston, MA: D. C. Heath.

Kuhlthau, C.C. (2004). Seeking meaning: a process approach to library and
information services. (2nd ed.). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Stonier, T. (1997). Information and meaning—An evolutionary perspective.
Berlin: Springer.

Wilbers, L. E. (2015). She has a pain problem, not a pill problem: Chronic pain management, stigma, and the family—An autoethnography. Humanity & Society, 39(1), 86-111.

The next new thing

Each week as I sit to write a blog post, I think about what’s been happening in my world and in the world of pain rehabilitation. It struck me this morning that we’re often a bit like “Ooooh! Shiny!” with new toys and techniques and research to read… yet as so many people point out, the old biopsychosocial (sociopsychobiological) framework doesn’t seem to have seeped down very far, particularly when we look at undergraduate training about pain. It’s like an abstract concept until we meet face-to-face with how poorly our original training sets us up for complexity and messiness.

And clinical work is inherently complex, ambiguous, emergent. We work with incomplete information. We pin our hopes upon asking questions about what we hope the problem is, take histories from people who don’t know what we want to know about, use assessment techniques that are full of measurement error and attempt to derive a pattern amongst the noise so we can give the person a name for what is wrong. And we need this label so we know, the person knows, the funding agency knows – what to do next.

What might our training teach us to do? Under the pressure of cramming an enormous amount of information about normal and abnormal function, our training may teach us to quickly discard uncertainty so we can answer the examiner’s questions promptly. We are possibly led towards a linear, time-constrained interview process where people present as neat problem lists, and where uncomfortable imprecision, particularly with respect to – ewwww! – feelings, thoughts, beliefs, family relationships, mental health, drug and alcohol use, coping strategies – yes all those things inside Pandora’s box – is put aside to focus on the real, physical problem we can do something about.

I think this kind of process sets us up to constantly seek the next new thing. We’d like to know that something will work for people who we know, once we start working in the real world, just don’t conform to our diagnostic boxes. Secretly perhaps we’re hoping there will be some wand or sparkle dust that will turn pumpkins in royal coaches, Cinderella into a beautiful, smart, and endlessly compliant patient who gets better within time frames!

While our training might be, in part, responsible for this tendency to seek simple and shiny and new, perhaps the problem goes deeper than this. Perhaps it’s about who we choose to recruit in training – the straight A students who seem to get along with people reasonably well, and who don’t have “problems”. Perhaps it’s also about our post-graduation training (CPD) opportunities – largely fueled by the need to “show evidence” of ongoing learning – that primarily focus on simple techniques that can be taught in a weekend.

What does working with ambiguity look like? Are there models of treatment in healthcare where being OK with not knowing, perhaps discovering together with the person coming for help, where we can feel safe enough to say “I’m not ready to do anything to you until I’ve got to know you better”, or better still “I’m not ready to work with you until we’ve got to know each other better”.

What would it take to reveal some of yourself in the same way we expect our patients to? And what would that do to our relationship dynamics? And the sense of who has power and who doesn’t? Could we challenge our assumptions about who the expert is?

If we adopted a sociopsychobiological model, we might need to begin by acknowledging the complexity of human relationships. Starting with acknowledging that macro influences on assumptions we take for granted – and recognising the similarities and differences between people. We might prioritise learning about social systems, law, folkways and mores, “in” groups and “out” groups and how they work, and even review our beliefs about socio-economic status and why people might not prioritise their health.

Then we might need to reflect on psychological aspects of ourselves and others. That we have a finite amount of room for processing information so we use heuristics that reduce cognitive demand but also reduce what we pay attention to. That we, too, have emotions and assumptions and beliefs about how good we are as clinicians, and what it’s like for the other person to see us strutting our stuff.

And of course, the biological aspects underpin everything – our skin-covered anti-gravity suits through which we view the world. Still there. Still important, but filtered through the social and psychological.

Would this reduce the temptation to look for the next shiny new thing? I’m not sure – but it might broaden the range of shiny new things we’d look at. Perhaps we might become so fascinated by the sociopsychological that we’d recognise there is far more influence on what people do in these domains than we are currently trained to notice. And maybe we’d be a little less enamoured of the toys so temptingly offered at weekend workshops.

Pain – or disability?

One of the fundamental distinctions we need to make when working with people who experience pain is to understand the difference between experiencing pain – and the behaviour or actions or responses we make to this experience. This is crucial because we can never know “what it is like” to experience pain – and all we have to rely on as external observers is what we see the person doing. Differentiating between the various dimensions associated with our experience of pain makes it far easier to address each part in the distinct ways needed.

Let me explain. We know the current definition of pain – an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in such terms (IASP, 1979). One of the key points of this definition was to remove the need for nociception as a requirement for pain to be present. So when we unpack what we understand about pain, the first step is to recognise that it’s an experience. Something we can never share with another person – just like we can’t share joy, the taste of a great craft beer, or what a lover’s touch is like.

We therefore have an inexact relationship between two concepts: nociception, or the biological mechanisms at play until the point at which we are conscious of pain; and pain, or the experience of what it is like to have an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in such terms.

But wait, there’s more. Given that this experience is a subjective, internal and personal experience – how do we know when someone is experiencing pain?

When I ask students, their answer is “oh you can see grimacing, wincing, or they tell you” – and it’s true! But let’s notice something: they’re all behaviours. Things people do, either involuntarily or voluntarily, to signal that they’re sore. Behaviours or actions are not a direct indication of “what it is like” to experience pain. Like nociception and pain, there is an inexact relationship between what someone does when they’re experiencing pain – and their resultant behaviour. So we now have three somewhat overlapping concepts: nociception (biology), pain (experience), and behaviours (actions). They overlap because there is no direct 1:1 relationship between these concepts – although in some cases it may seem like there is.

What else influences our pain experience? If you’ve been paying attention to my blog these last few weeks, you’ll know that thoughts or beliefs and emotions also influence both our experience of pain and our behaviour. For example, if we know that the pain we’re experiencing is for good (such as post-surgical pain after hip replacement), we tend to be more forgiving, or at least more willing to experience it than if someone attacked us with a scalpel down some back alley! We have plenty of evidence that simply knowing the supposed cause, and something about the biology of pain, can help people to feel a little differently about it (emotions), and to move differently (behaviour) (Moseley & Butler, 2015; Tegner, Frederiksen, Esbensen & Juhl, in press), while emotions in both experimental and clinical studies have been shown to strongly affect pain intensity – and subsequent behavioural responses (Orenius, Raij, Nuortimo, Naatanen, Lipsanen, & Karlsson, 2017). Once again, the relationships are not exact – which is almost always the case when we’re studying complex systems!

Because thoughts, beliefs and emotions have both impacts on nociceptive processes and on pain experience and behaviours, I’ve depicted them as overlapping (if there was a way to show this in 3-D believe me, I would!).

But wait, there’s more!

We know context makes an enormous difference to a person’s experience of pain AND the behaviours they take in response to their pain. While contextual factors don’t directly influence nociception, these factors do influence thoughts and beliefs, emotions, and behaviour. For example, we know that in adolescents with pain, parental responses influence the amount of treatment seeking (Stone, Bruehl, Smith, Garber & Walker, 2018); and that spouses or partners of people living with pain can affect both pain intensity and behaviour because of the way they interact (Burns, Post, Smith, Porter, Buvanendran, Fras & Keefe, 2018). We also know that in different communities, responses to pain can differ: people who pursue body suspension (being pierced and suspended by hooks) are supported by those around them to “hang in there” (no pun intended!). Factors such as legislation make a difference to pursuing treatment, while treatment itself can perpetuate disability and may even increase attention to pain.

Why bother explaining all this?

The implications of understanding these associations are quite profound. Firstly, nociception is a small but important contributor to our pain experience. Most pain starts with a nociceptive stimulus, even if it ultimately ends up less influential than cortical ‘interpretive’ processes. Secondly, the experience we have of pain is something we can’t share – and thirdly the only way we can begin to infer that another person has pain is via their behaviours, or what they do. This means pain measures like the visual analogue scale, FACES scale, numeric rating scale are not direct measures but are used by people to give a message about their pain. All behaviour is influenced by both our thoughts/beliefs and emotions and contextual factors including who is nearby, past responses they’ve made to our messages, what’s normal or expected in various contexts, and the purpose we believe our behaviour will serve. And of course, many of the influences and behaviours we do are not things we’re consciously aware of because we’ve been doing them since we were born.

So when I think about what we might do to help someone with their pain, I firstly acknowledge that I can’t directly influence someone’s own experience. I’m working to influence what they do about their pain, their relationship to their pain, their beliefs and understanding, their emotions and how they communicate this to other people around them. And to me, the first step is being ready to hear what people believe about their pain. Only after I’ve successfully conveyed this to the person can I ever begin to come alongside them to help them change what they do.

 

Burns, J. W., Post, K. M., Smith, D. A., Porter, L. S., Buvanendran, A., Fras, A. M., & Keefe, F. J. (2018). Spouse criticism and hostility during marital interaction: effects on pain intensity and behaviors among individuals with chronic low back pain. Pain, 159(1), 25-32.

Moseley, G. L., & Butler, D. S. (2015). Fifteen years of explaining pain: The past, present, and future. J Pain, 16(9), 807-813. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2015.05.005

Orenius, T. I., Raij, T. T., Nuortimo, A., Näätänen, P., Lipsanen, J., & Karlsson, H. (2017). The interaction of emotion and pain in the insula and secondary somatosensory cortex. Neuroscience, 349, 185-194.

Porreca, F., & Navratilova, E. (2017). Reward, motivation, and emotion of pain and its relief. Pain, 158, S43-S49.

Stone, A. L., Bruehl, S., Smith, C. A., Garber, J., & Walker, L. S. (2018). Social learning pathways in the relation between parental chronic pain and daily pain severity and functional impairment in adolescents with functional abdominal pain. Pain, 159(2), 298-305.

Tegner, H., Frederiksen, P., Esbensen, B. A., & Juhl, C. (2018). Neurophysiological pain-education for patients with chronic low back pain-a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Clinical Journal of Pain.

Occupational therapists’ knowledge of pain

I am mightily bothered by health professionals’ lack of knowledge about pain. Perhaps it’s my “teacher” orientation, but it seems to me that if we work in an area, we should grab as much information about that area as possible – and pain and pain management is such an important part of practice for every health professional that I wonder why it’s so often neglected. So, to begin exploring this, I completed a search looking at occupational therapists’ knowledge of pain – and struck gold,  kinda.

Angelica Reyes and Cary Brown conducted a survey of Canadian occupational therapists, to explore how well occupational therapists knew their stuff.

Members of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists were asked to participate and a total of 354 therapists (mainly from Ontario, Alberta and Nova Scotia) took part. Curious that few were from British Columbia where I know of quite a few occupational therapists working in the area, but there you have it.  Over half of the respondents had 10 years or less experience – so they were fairly recent graduates and should reflect a “current” educational bias. Only 5% of the total number of members of CAOT responded, so this is a fraction of the occupational therapists working in Canada – but you’d think the motivated (ie knowledgeable) would be more likely to respond than those who don’t work in the area….

What they found was consistent with previous studies (prior to 2000) showing that these respondents, who were surveyed using the City of Boston’s Rehabilitation Professionals’ Knowledge and Attitude Survey (Rochman & Herbert, 2015), had disturbing “potential knowledge gaps” in the following areas:

• children’s ability to feel pain;
• use of analgesics in orthopedic pain
• use of nondrug treatments
• thermal modalities
• prevalence of malingering
• impact of therapists’ values on assessment of veracity
• mind/body dualism in chronic pain
• measurement of pain intensity
• effect of under-treatment on chronicity
• prevalence of patients who over-report pain
• prevalence ofpatients who are likely to become addicted if treated with opioids.

Of particular concerns was 45.7% of participants believed that malingering is common; 38% believed that pain intensity can be objectively measured, 39.7% believed people with pain over-report their pain, and 59.8% believed that opioid addiction is likely to occur in more than 5% of the patient population.

OUCH!

So, it seems that these occupational therapists had some very outdated ideas about pain, and in particular, seem to have missed the point that because pain is a biopsychosocial experience, we have no way to determine whether someone is “faking” – or malingering.

Now, I will lay good money on a bet that if we were to carry out this very same survey amongst any other health profession, we’d still arrive at these rather unsavoury findings. Folks, I live in a pain nerd bubble and I still hear these kinds of discussions amongst knowledgeable health professionals, so it’s unsurprising that so many people hold these beliefs. Beliefs that will hamper developing good relationships with the people we want to help, and beliefs that fly in the face of what we know about pain.

I am SO not pointing the finger at Canadian occupational therapists, neither am I pointing the finger at my profession alone. I think this lack of understanding reflects many things:

1. Pain is a complex experience, and the legacies of ancient models lingers everywhere (dualism, medical model, reductionism, etc);
2. We devote very little time in our professional training to learning about pain – and often, it’s limited to “here is the nociceptive system”;
3. The research around pain has exploded over the last 15 years – it’s hard to keep up, which is why I blog;
4. The problem of persistent pain is under-estimated, so if a person works in paediatrics, older person’s health, neurology, brain injury, spinal cord injury – it’s quite probable that pain is almost completely ignored, because “it’s not relevant”. After all, pain is something for specialist pain services, yes? NO
5. Prevailing attitudes within the healthcare community are that pain is a difficult area to understand – and “should” be treated with medication or surgery otherwise….

You can see that this year’s IASP Global Year for Excellence in Pain Education has much to do.

Did you know that IASP have produced NINE comprehensive curricula – including occupational therapy  (thank you to Emeritus Professor Jenny Strong, Professor Cary Brown and Dr Derek Jones for developing this wonderful resource). This means there is no reason for us not to begin integrating this import area of practice into our undergraduate training.

Research examining occupational therapy’s contribution within pain management is in its infancy – but oh how my occupational therapy heart went pit-a-pat when, at the Australian and New Zealand Pain Society Scientific Meeting I presented alongside two other occupational therapists with PhD’s (or nearly there!) to a room full of clinicians, not just occupational therapists. While we have little specifically occupational therapy research, occupational therapists have been and are continuing to be part of research efforts around the world. And what clinicians do is apply what is learned into the daily lives of the people we work with. That, friends, is what occupational therapy is about – helping people live full, rich lives doing what’s important to them.

Reyes, A. N., & Brown, C. A. (2016). Occupational therapists’ pain knowledge: A national survey. Disability and Rehabilitation: An International, Multidisciplinary Journal, 38(13), 1309-1317.

Rochman D, Herbert P. Rehabilitation professionals knowledge and attitudes regarding pain (COBS). Accessed 18 March 2015. Available from: http://prc.coh.org/html/rehab_professionals.htm.