What do occupational therapists add to pain management/rehabilitation?

Coming from a small profession that has side-stepped (more or less) a conventional biomedical model, I’ve found my inclusion in pain management and rehabilitation is not always easily understood by other clinicians. It doesn’t help that occupational therapists practice in very diverse settings, and what we do may look superficially like handing out raised toilet seats, playing with kids, doing work-site assessments or hand therapy!

Today I hope to remedy this a bit, and extend a challenge to clinicians from other professions to sum up what your profession adds in 25 words or less (the first sentence in this definition below is fewer than 25 just sayin’).

“Occupational therapy is a client-centred health profession concerned with promoting health and well being through occupation. The primary goal of occupational therapy is to enable people to participate in the activities of everyday life. Occupational therapists achieve this outcome by working with people and communities to enhance their ability to engage in the occupations they want to, need to, or are expected to do, or by modifying the occupation or the environment to better support their occupational engagement. (WFOT 2012)“

In occupational therapy, occupations refer to the everyday activities that people do as individuals, in families and with communities to occupy time and bring meaning and purpose to life. Occupations include things people need to, want to and are expected to do.

In other words, although we may often be found dragging adaptive equipment around a hospital, our work is really about what people need and want to do – every day, and in every way.

One of the major impacts of pain for people is on their capability for doing, whether this is short-term, or becomes a long-term change.

How and what we do in daily life is influenced by individual values, the various contexts we interact with, temporal changes over the days and as we develop and mature, our culture and what helps us express who we are. The choices of what we wear, how we spend our work life, what we do for fun and leisure, how we communicate, how we navigate health systems, what we choose to eat and how we prepare it – all of these reflect our self concept. Occupational therapists focus on helping people resume or develop ways to do all of these things, so when someone develops pain that interferes with daily doing, it’s our job to help them do what matters in their life.

Something that many clinicians seem unaware of is that occupational therapy training covers both physical health and mental health (not that I think it’s possible to divide them!). As a profession we’re able to use (almost) any therapeutic approach that we can use to enable participating in a person’s occupations. We also employ occupations as therapies – such as dog walking for exercise, or blogging to develop executive functioning skills, or going to the mall for graded exposure to sensory input, or preparing an evening meal as part of applying pacing skills.

In fact, given that daily life is occupational therapy’s “domain of concern”, one way you could define the profession’s contribution to pain management and rehabilitation is to call us knowledge translators. Our job is to help people embed what can often be “theoretical” concepts developed in physiotherapy or psychology, into the daily life contexts of people being seen. It’s an occupational therapist’s work to help establish whether pacing, for example, can actually be used in a conveyer-belt process job. It’s an occupational therapist’s job to look at when and where and how a person can integrate their home exercise programme in light of all the other responsibilities a person has. It’s an occupational therapist’s joy to help someone discover the many ways a father can “be a good Dad” even in the presence of low back pain that means playing rough and tumble isn’t a good thing right now.

What’s the evidence for occupational therapy? Well, one way to consider this is to think about how we might study what are bespoke solutions tailored to suit an individual in his or her home/work/leisure context. I personally don’t think RCTs are the best strategy because those individually-tailored solutions don’t lend themselves to being applied in a recipe-like way. I know that people may change their expectations (and therefore their goals) as they move through pain management, so the end point shifts, making standardised outcome measures especially of function/disability not especially useful.

Another way we can think about this is whether the techniques/strategies themselves require further research to validate their usefulness. Given the enormous literature on, for example, exercise for chronic pain, the conclusion I’ve come to is that the form of exercise is less important than that it gets done. And in the case of ongoing pain, we know that movement practices will need to be done – yep, for life! This means they need variety (plenty of options), they need intrinsic motivation (the “why” is so important), they need to be embedded into a person’s routines (so they get done), and there needs to be room for future change. And all of these are within occupational therapy’s scope of practice.

When it comes to dealing with the demoralisation, stigma and perhaps even low mood and sense of loss of self that’s associated with pain, doing what matters at the right level of intensity, complexity and expression is intrinsically part of therapy. Psychological therapies such as ACT, CBT, EMDR, graded exposure, trauma management, mindfulness, relaxation training, effective communication – these are all bread and butter for occupational therapists – in the context of taking the person from the clinic office into their daily life. After all, the most effective way to find out what’s going through someone’s mind when they’re starting to do movements they’ve been worried about is to – oh yeah, do it in real time in the real world. Similarly, doing things that help people feel productive, capable, creative and “back to normal” are all part of occupational therapy’s remit.

Wondering about the training and competence? Some readers might be surprised that occupational therapy training is equivalent to physiotherapy, nursing, social work, and indeed any of the other allied health. Many occupational therapists hold occupational therapy master’s degrees, and there are a growing number of us with PhDs. We come from backgrounds including psychology, physiotherapy, nursing, teaching…What is most important, according to the OTBNZ, our NZ Regulatory Body, is that occupational therapists adhere to the requirements for competence. There are five broad areas, and every occupational therapist must undertake both supervision and maintain a Portfolio of ongoing learning and reflection. CPD “points” and “hours” are irrelevant: what matters is that occupational therapists reflect on what they learn and consider how it might influence their practice. Finally, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, our profession has embraced bicultural practice, and you’ll find occupational therapists equally at home calling themselves kaiwhakaora ngangahau. Whakaora means to restore to health and ngangahau is an adjective meaning – active, spirited, zealous. In choosing this translation, the Maori Language Commission is conveying the idea of reawakening, or restoring to health one’s activeness, spiritedness and zeal – occupational therapy.

My plea to clinicians working in pain management and rehabilitation is to take some time to listen to your occupational therapist colleagues. Understand where they’re coming from and why they offer what they do – and take up the challenge I made at the beginning of this post: sum up what you offer in 25 words or less.

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (iii)

I’m an old hack when it comes to teamwork and pain management: I’ve worked in this field a long time. I’m familiar with reactions to both interpersonal differences within a team (and the myriad ways these can be expressed), and to the discourse that happens when posting a publicly available message. In fact, that’s why I publish on social media: so we can have open conversations rather than ones hidden behind paywalls, or in rarified academic settings. Humans are odd, and when poked – even when poked with good evidence – want to react, to bite back. The following comments are not about any specific organisation. I’ll repeat that: comments about what we do in healthcare (ie bullying – nurses call this ‘horizontal violence’, stigmatising, excluding, not supporting etc) in the two articles I’ve written so far on how to prevent good clinicians do not relate to any one organisation. They are based on personal experience (my own) and experiences I’ve read in the literature.

There is an elephant in the room. It’s possibly the biggest one we have in teamwork and it’s about dispute resolution. How do we resolve contrasting clinical models, interpersonal styles, personal and professional values, hierarchies (explicit or implicit) without compromising important and valid points, and without blowing relationships between team members out of the water? An alternative is to leave, as I did, having seen several clinicians put through the wringer by accusations of bullying and being the recipient of bullying myself.

I’m drawn to Dr Todd B. Kashdan’s work in his most recent book “The Art of Insubordination: How to dissent and defy effectively” because he offers well-researched strategies for individuals and groups to disrupt the status quo – not for the purpose of disrupting for the sake of it, but because of personal integrity and ethical standards. Values that clash with “received wisdom”. Creative ideas that could change practice positively, but land flat because they’re “different”. The desire to create social value – not from a place of “I’m superior, you should do it my way” or spite “I just want to get you back for being dominant” or self-interest “I want you to do this because it’ll line my pockets” (p. 11., The Art of Insubordination).

You see, principled insubordination is one reason for disputes in teams. It could be an occupational therapist identifying that participating in daily life really matters to people with chronic pain but working in a team where everyone gets the same recipe for treatment. It might be a physiotherapist who sees that there could be ways to see people in small groups, rather than individually – but gets smacked down because “that’s not the way we do it”. It might be the social worker who dreams of bringing whanau/family into pain management, but can’t get a toe in the door of a team with a strong medical procedure focus.

Each of these people holds strong values, wants to be person-centred, can see there are opportunities, and sincerely communicates them to the team. Even the idea of interprofessional or transprofessional working, where each person steps up to do what matters to the person in front of them although it doesn’t look like conventional “role division” can be an effective way to be a radical and principled rebel.

While the ideas Todd articulates SO well in his book are absolutely worth doing if you’re the principled rebel, one thing I worry about is placing the responsibility only on the rebel. It’s difficult being the one swimming against the current. It can lead to personal isolation, burnout, poor team trust, difficulty sharing information that is unique to your profession (or your encounters with a patient), less reporting critical problems and ultimately, to closing down and walking away (O’Donovan, De Brun & McAuliffe, 2021).

Stephanie Zajac and colleagues (Zajac, et al., 2021) developed a framework for healthcare team effectiveness and clearly identifies the crucial contribution of the organisation, team leadership, technical competence and having team roles and purpose (Fig. 1, p. 4). Without a supportive culture, executive leadership and teamwork reinforcement as a value, the organisational conditions likely work against effective teamwork. Without shared leadership, accountability and coaching, teams flounder and fragment. Without adequate training, the capability to do the work well, and sufficient staffing, teams don’t have sufficient technical competence to be effective. Finally, without role definitions, team directions and developing and monitoring team norms, teams will likely experience conflict and who should or can do tasks, and what’s OK and not OK within the team. Note this doesn’t inevitably mean “my role” and “your role” – inter and transprofessional team work demands blurring between roles. This is about articulating and being clear about how team members work together.

And who needs to ensure these organisational “meta-team skills” are clear, supported and maintained? Yes, it’s everyone’s job – but it’s also the organisation’s leadership team’s job to make sure it happens. After all, the leadership team should have skin in the game.

Conflict is inevitable. Some schools of thought believe that conflict is healthy, a sign of divergent thinking rather than conformity, that conflict enables people to challenge their own assumptions (O’Neill, Allen & Hastongs, 2013). At the same time, forms of conflict can be painful and damaging to the individuals involved. Disagreeing about what is done is less damaging than conflict with a member of the team. Consequently, two points spring to mind: 1. Left to fester, interpersonal conflict will reduce team trust, and ultimately stymie collaboration. People will revert to silence, and a “them and us” will emerge. Processes involving transparent, open conversations (see this link), often moving beyond the key antagonists and into the whole team, are crucial. These may involve clear policies and procedures, and need to be facilitated – preferably by someone external to the team, but knowledgeable. 2. “Ground rules” must be established about how to disagree, challenge one another, articulate different perspectives. Why? Because disagreement and conflict is inevitable, so we need to minimise the fall-out, but more importantly, because conflict when well-managed is the lifeblood of creativity and responsiveness (psst! it’s also really good for critical thinking).

Kim, S., Bochatay, N., Relyea-Chew, A., Buttrick, E., Amdahl, C., Kim, L., Frans, E., Mossanen, M., Khandekar, A., Fehr, R., & Lee, Y. M. (2017, May). Individual, interpersonal, and organisational factors of healthcare conflict: A scoping review. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 31(3), 282-290. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2016.1272558

O’Donovan, R., De Brun, A., & McAuliffe, E. (2021). Healthcare Professionals Experience of Psychological Safety, Voice, and Silence. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 626689. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626689

O’Neill, T. A., Allen, N. J., & Hastings, S. E. (2013). Examining the “Pros” and “Cons” of TeamConflict: A Team-Level Meta-Analysis of Task, Relationship, and Process Conflict. Human Performance, 26(3), 236-260. https://doi.org/10.1080/08959285.2013.795573

Zajac, S., Woods, A., Tannenbaum, S., Salas, E., & Holladay, C. L. (2021). Overcoming Challenges to Teamwork in Healthcare: A Team Effectiveness Framework and Evidence-Based Guidance. Frontiers in Communication, 6(6). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.606445

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (ii)

I’ve been asked to amend (actually, to remove) these two posts, so I’ve altered the opening sentence – you’re reading it now. I’ve also added some comments to preface these two posts.
I’m an old hack when it comes to teamwork and pain management: I’ve worked in this field a long time. I’m familiar with reactions to both interpersonal differences within a team (and the myriad ways these can be expressed), and to the discourse that happens when posting a publicly available message. In fact, that’s why I publish on social media: so we can have open conversations rather than ones hidden behind paywalls, or in rarified academic settings. Humans are odd, and when poked – even when poked with good evidence – want to react, to bite back. The following comments are not about any specific organisation. I’ll repeat that: comments about what we do in healthcare (ie bullying – nurses call this ‘horizontal violence’, stigmatising, excluding, not supporting etc) in the two articles I’ve written so far on how to prevent good clinicians do not relate to any one organisation. They are based on personal experience (my own) and experiences I’ve read in the literature.

Last week I started a series of posts on how we can stop good clinicians leaving pain management. I began with funding because, at least in New Zealand, lack of funding is a significant part of the problem of staff retention.

Now I want to look at how we prepare clinicians to work in pain management.

One of the major barriers in New Zealand is the dominance of musculoskeletal rehabilitation in physiotherapy clinics around the country. How could direct access to musculoskeletal rehabilitation be a bad thing, you ask? Well, it’s mainly because pain management is not musculoskeletal rehabilitation – and yet most of the workforce for pain management here comes from musculoskeletal physiotherapists.

I like physiotherapists, some of them are even very good friends! And I recognise that good physiotherapists have moved a long way from the old “back school” staff sergeant approach! Many physiotherapists have developed their skills well beyond analysing pelvic tilt and using “special tests” with limited inter-rater reliability and even less predictive validity. There are good physio’s who are skilled in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, who routinely look at values and use motivational approaches in their clinical practice.

But, how well are new graduate physiotherapists (and indeed other entry-level health professionals) prepared for chronic pain work? (remember that many clinics in NZ employ entry-level therapists because they’re inexpensive, and chronic pain management isn’t a very profitable area – and staff turnover is a thing).

Unlike acute and subacute musculoskeletal rehabilitation, regression to the mean (ie returning to a baseline level of capability) doesn’t happen much in chronic pain rehab. Natural history doesn’t happen either, not four or more years after the original onset. Most treatments for chronic pain show very small effect sizes on both pain intensity and disability.

Progress towards goals is slow, and there are many – many! – flare-ups, set-backs, detours and plateaus. Because pain problems have lasted longer than expected, people have had time to worry, to be given inaccurate information, to have had poor sleep for ages, to have stopped doing the things that bring life into life, to have had several unsuccessful treatments – consequently, people with chronic pain often hold negative expectations about how effective a treatment will be.

How well do we prepare entry-level clinicians for the challenges of treatments not working? Despite the therapist “doing all the right things”?? Do we prepare them for the ambiguity and uncertainty of working without a clear diagnosis? without an algorithm? without a “simplifying process”? Chronic pain is complex!

How well do we prepare entry-level therapists not to take responsibility for a person’s outcomes? Or do we inculcate them into the idea that they must “get it right” all the time or they’ve “done something wrong”?

Do we spend so much time teaching a certain school of therapy, or set of special tests, that we forget to help them learn to listen well first? Do we teach them that mind and body are separate – and that psychological and psychosocial only come into play when “the bio” has failed to respond to treatment? Do we imply this, even inadvertently?

When do we teach entry-level therapists how to deal with therapy failure? How to work in the dark? How to revise their formulation when a treatment doesn’t have the intended effect? Where do we teach entry-level therapists how to seek and accept supervision – and how do we help them view supervision as a supportive opportunity to develop as a person and therapist?

And how well do we prepare entry-level clinicians to work well in a team, where they’ll come into contact with other clinicians seemingly “stepping into my scope”? In other words, where other clinicians have broad skills and experience, and who do what they do… Do we teach undergraduates how to be confident enough in their professional value that they stop being defensive?

Solutions, that’s right. I was going to suggest solutions.

Solutions include much more time working with other professions during training – and not just the ones handy to where they’re being trained. Solutions include ensuring the process of clinical reasoning is emphasised rather than the outcome. Solutions involve teaching undergraduates that they will carry on learning and that more experienced therapists from other professions will teach them a lot. Solutions might include ensuring that all students spend regular time with a supervisor who is not there to “correct” them, but instead to foster their self-reflection, to offer them support when they’re feeling overwhelmed, to encourage them to be OK to feel lost and not know the answers. And perhaps solutions involve recognising that chronic pain management is a specialist area of practice, and it is not musculoskeletal rehabilitation with a psychosocial twist.

Gordon, D. B., Watt-Watson, J., & Hogans, B. B. (2018). Interprofessional pain education-with, from, and about competent, collaborative practice teams to transform pain care. Pain Reports, 3(3), e663. https://doi.org/10.1097/PR9.0000000000000663

Lindblad, T. L. (2021, Jun). Ethical Considerations in Clinical Supervision: Components of Effective Clinical Supervision Across an Interprofessional Team. Behavior Analysis in Practice 14(2), 478-490. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00514-y

O’Carroll, V., Owens, M., Sy, M., El-Awaisi, A., Xyrichis, A., Leigh, J., Nagraj, S., Huber, M., Hutchings, M., & McFadyen, A. (2021, May-Jun). Top tips for interprofessional education and collaborative practice research: a guide for students and early career researchers. J Interprof Care, 35(3), 328-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2020.1777092

Perreault, K., Dionne, C. E., Rossignol, M., Poitras, S., & Morin, D. (2018, Jul). What are private sector physiotherapists’ perceptions regarding interprofessional and intraprofessional work for managing low back pain? Journal of Interprofessional Care, 32(4), 525-528. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2018.1451829

Steuber, T. D., Andrus, M. R., Wright, B. M., Blevins, N., & Phillippe, H. M. (2021). Effect of Interprofessional Clinical Debates on Attitudes of Interprofessional Teams. PRiMER, 5, 14. https://doi.org/10.22454/PRiMER.2021.154149

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (i)

I’ve been asked to amend (actually, to remove) these two posts, so I’ve altered the opening sentence – you’re reading it now. I’ve also added some comments to preface these two posts.
I’m an old hack when it comes to teamwork and pain management: I’ve worked in this field a long time. I’m familiar with reactions to both interpersonal differences within a team (and the myriad ways these can be expressed), and to the discourse that happens when posting a publicly available message. In fact, that’s why I publish on social media: so we can have open conversations rather than ones hidden behind paywalls, or in rarified academic settings. Humans are odd, and when poked – even when poked with good evidence – want to react, to bite back. The following comments are not about any specific organisation. I’ll repeat that: comments about what we do in healthcare (ie bullying – nurses call this ‘horizontal violence’, stigmatising, excluding, not supporting etc) in the two articles I’ve written so far on how to prevent good clinicians do not relate to any one organisation. They are based on personal experience (my own) and experiences I’ve read in the literature. [added 12 September 2022]

I thought I’d look at what we can do to stop good clinicians leaving pain management.

While our jurisdictions have differences in pay rates, reimbursement approaches and treatment codes, at the heart of good healthcare is good people who want to help. So why, when healthcare is populated with caring clinicians, do we strike bullying, lack of support for one another, non-existent teamwork, and poor career pathways? What is going on?

I’ll tackle these in bite-sized chunks, starting with the funders. And of course, I want to point out some of the contributing factors.

Funders

Funders (insurers, agencies paying for treatment) have at their heart, a fear of being taken for a ride. People with pain can be viewed with suspicion because their problems cannot be imaged. Why else spend such inordinate amounts of money on investigating whether someone ‘meets criteria’ for treatment?

Historically in New Zealand, we have one national accident insurer – a no-fault, 24/7 insurance for any accidental injury sustained in work, out of work, in school, while on the roads, wherever. At times this insurer has been fairly generous – certainly when I started working in this area in the 1980s there were plenty of people with chronic pain that I saw having had 300 or more physiotherapy sessions. “Passive” therapy (hot packs and ultrasound) was carried out routinely. Our insurer certainly got stung by the over-use of unhelpful treatments and since then has systematically reduced access to passive therapies, and also seems to have physiotherapy practice in its sights. Sadly, it has not been quite as focused on reducing unhelpful surgeries, repeated injection procedures, and medical reports denying that chronic pain is a thing.

The community pain contracts funded by our insurer were, at initial conception, a good thing. Bring community-based therapists together to form local pain teams to respond early to people at risk of developing long-term disability associated with pain. Lots of new set-ups emerged with lots and lots of cobbling teams together: ad hoc coalitions of clinicians who didn’t know one another. Set on a background of messy referral processes, limited understanding of how the contracts worked, and a very limited budget, now was the time for large international groups to swoop in and sweep up small practices to form national organisations which simplified contracting for our insurer. And so they did.

Large organisations offer benefits to insurers. The risk of a single provider failing is reduced because the uneven nature of referrals is smoothed across the country. There are economies of scale from an administrative point of view. Some organisations have employed excellent people as clinical leaders for pain teams.

And yet… limited understanding of what teamwork is in pain management and how teams need to be supported and developed, combined with poor funding, and scarcity of skilled and specialised clinicians has led to teams on paper. Teams who rarely, if ever, meet; teams with no common model of pain; teams who don’t work collaboratively – serial therapy? not even that – a series of disjointed, uncoordinated therapies where the physical exercise programme is delivered by an entry-level physiotherapists a month or more before the person sees a psychologist who may not have any training or knowledge about pain management, while funding is spent on an unnecessary pharmacy session, and a pain assessment by a pain specialist who are scarcer than hen’s teeth and far more expensive than the rest of the entire programme combined.

What’s the answer? As usual, more than one…

• Adequate funding for team meetings – preferably face-to-face, and preferably weekly. Co-location helps
• Ensuring the team has a common model of pain.
• Workforce stability – outcomes reduce if the team has a high staff turnover
• Effective orientation and induction to the team
• Processes and structures that foster sharing information that often doesn’t get shared
• Training in how to negotiate, collaborate, amalgamate differing opinions
• Training and recognition of specialised knowledge that transcends individual professions (in other words, professionals become transprofessional rather than silos)

And what of these organisations swooping in to carry out cookie-cutter approaches?

I am not an advocate of private providers working in health. What we’ve seen here since 2017 and the community pain contracts is the top slice of money heading off to shareholders and managers with fancy new cars, little to no career pathway planning for senior clinicians, an increase in placing newly graduated therapists into pain management without adequate clinical or emotional support, and an overall high level of turnover amongst clinicians in the field.

This is partly because our insurer has restricted pain funding. It is also partly because these organisations (including the insurer) fail to recognise that chronic pain management is a specialised field with specialised requirements. It’s not a place for new graduates – but if you have limited profit from programmes, what would you do? Yep, you’d employ clinicians you don’t have to pay as much to, and allow the senior clinicians to leave. You’d avoid offering effective clinical and emotional supervision because this is seen as a cost to the company. You’d fund weekend courses in pain management, but not fund time for teams to integrate this knowledge. Similarly, you wouldn’t fund meetings or induction because you’d see these as an unnecessary cost. After all, isn’t pain management simple?

The two most heartbreaking aspects of this current situation are (1) the burnout of clinicians who initially put heart and soul into their work, do their best to maximise the scant funding, work long hours, seek contracts that might offer the person/patient/client something useful – but do so and obscure just how poorly the funding model is working. And (2) the people with pain who are offered disjointed therapy (not a team approach) delivered by junior therapists who feel unsupported and don’t have the skill or knowledge to work in this area, and who deliver cookie cutter treatments because of this and leave. The patients receive ineffective therapy but the insurer can tick the box that they’ve “had pain management.”

Is this the view of an old hack who wants the glory days to return? Maybe – but I feel for the people with pain who are just not getting good pain management. Access to services may be there – but access to unhelpful, cookie cutter, disjointed therapy from disheartened clinicians does not lead to good outcomes. And the sad thing is that there’s enough teamwork research in pain management to show what does work.

NZ Pain Society Report on the impact of a new contract: request this from the NZ Pain Society

Buljac-Samardzic, M., Doekhie, K. D., & van Wijngaarden, J. D. H. (2020, Jan 8). Interventions to improve team effectiveness within health care: a systematic review of the past decade. Human Resoures for Health, 18(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-019-0411-3

Griffin, H., & Hay-Smith, E. J. C. (2019). Characteristics of a well-functioning chronic pain team: A systematic review. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 47(1).

Matthew, O. T., & Samuel, E. H. (2021). Examining Team Communication and Mutual Support as Drivers of Work Performance among Team Members. Asian Research Journal of Arts & Social Sciences, 45-54. https://doi.org/10.9734/arjass/2021/v13i430223

O’Donovan, R., De Brun, A., & McAuliffe, E. (2021). Healthcare Professionals Experience of Psychological Safety, Voice, and Silence. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 626689. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626689

Zajac, S., Woods, A., Tannenbaum, S., Salas, E., & Holladay, C. L. (2021). Overcoming Challenges to Teamwork in Healthcare: A Team Effectiveness Framework and Evidence-Based Guidance. Frontiers in Communication, 6(6). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.606445

Biopsychological pain management is not enough

I recently read a preprint of an editorial for Pain, the IASP journal. It was written by Prof Michael Nicholas, and the title reads “The biopsychosocial model of pain 40 years on: time for a reappraisal?” The paper outlines when and how pain became conceptualised within a biopsychosocial framework by the pioneers of interprofessional pain management: John Loeser (1982) and Gordon Waddell (1984). Nicholas points out the arguments against a biopsychosocial model with some people considering that despite it being a “holistic” framework, it often gets applied in a biomedical and psychological way. In other words, that biomedical concerns are prioritised, with the psychosocial factors relegated to second place and only after the biomedical treatments have not helped. Still others separate the relationships between “bio” “psycho” and “social” such that the interdependent nature of these factors is not recognisable.

Nicholas declares, too:

“… that cognitive behavioural therapy interventions that did not also include workplace modifications or service coordination components were not effective in helping workers with mental health conditions in RTW. That means, just like in the case of reducing time lost at school for children in pain, the treatment providers for adults in pain for whom RTW is a goal should liaise closely with the workplace. Unfortunately, as the studies from the systematic reviews examined earlier for a range of common pain therapies indicated, engaging with the workplace as part of the treatment seems to be rarely attempted.“

I find this confusing. In 1999 I completed my MSc thesis looking at this very thing: pain management combined with a focus on using pain management approaches in the workplace. The programme was called “WorkAbilities” and included visits to the workplace, liaison with employers and even job seeking for those who didn’t have a job to return to. The confusion for me lies in the fact that I’ve been doing pain rehabilitation within the workplace since the mid-1980’s – and that while today’s approach for people funded by ACC is separated from pain management (more is the pity), there are many clinicians actively working in pain rehabilitation in the context of returning to work here in New Zealand.

I’m further puzzled by the complete lack of inclusion by Nicholas of occupational therapy’s contribution to “the social” aspects of learning to live well with pain. This, despite the many studies showing occupational therapists are intimately connected with social context: the things people do in their daily lives, with the people and environmental contexts in which they do them. You see, occupational therapists do this routinely. We work with the person in their own environment and this includes home, work, leisure.

For those that remain unaware of what occupational therapists offer people with pain, I put it like this: Occupational therapists provide contextualised therapy, our work is in knowledge translation or generalising the things people learn in gyms, and in clinics, and helping people do these things in their life, their way.

An example might help.

Joe (not his real name) had a sore back, he’d had it for about three months and was seeing a physiotherapist and a psychologist funded by ACC (NZ’s national insurer). Not much was changing. He remained fearful of moving especially in his workplace where he was a heavy diesel mechanic and was under pressure from a newly promoted workshop manager to get things done quickly. Joe was sore and cranky, didn’t sleep well, and his partner was getting fed up. Joe’s problems were:

• guarding his lower back when moving
• fear he would further hurt his back if he lifted heavy things, or worked in a bent-over position, or the usual awkward positions diesel mechanics adopt
• avoiding said movements and positions, or doing them with gritted teeth and a lot of guarding
• poor sleep despite the sleep hygiene his psychologist had prescribed
• irritability
• thoroughly enjoying the gym-based exercise programme
• hating mindfulness and any of the CBT-based strategies the psychologist was offering him, because as he put it “I never did homework when I went to school, do you think I’m going to do it now? and this mindfulness thing doesn’t work!”

The occupational therapist visited Joe at home. She went through his daily routine and noticed that he didn’t spend any time on “fun” things or with his mates. His intimacy with his partner was scant because the medications he was on were making it hard for him to even get an erection, and his partner was scared he’d be hurt when they made love. Besides, she was fed up with all the time he had to spend going in to the gym after work when he wasn’t doing simple things around home, like mowing lawns, or helping with grocery shopping.

She went into his workplace and found it was a small four-person operation, with one workshop manager, two mechanics and one apprentice. The workshop was a health and safety hazard, messy and cramped, and open to the weather. The relationships between the team were strained with unpleasant digs at his failure to keep up the pace. The workshop manager said that he’d do his best to help Joe out – but in the end he needed to get the work out on time. The other mechanic, an old hand, meanwhile was telling Joe to suck it up and be a man, but also to watch out because Joe shouldn’t do as he’d done and shagged his back.

What did our erstwhile occupational therapist do? Absolutely nothing new that the physiotherapist and psychologist hadn’t taught Joe – but she worked out when, where and how Joe could USE the strategies they’d discussed in his life contexts. She went through the way he moved in the workshop and guided him to relax a little and find some new movement patterns to be able to do his work. She graded the challenges for him, and stayed with him as he experimented. She discussed alternating the tasks he did, interspersing tasks that involved bending forward with those where he could stand upright or even work above his head (in the pit). She discussed how he could use being fully present at various times during the day (mindfulness) to check in with his body and go for a brisk walk if he felt himself tensing up. She worked through communication strategies that they rehearsed and he implemented to let his manager know what he could – and could not – do.

They discussed his home life, and ways he could begin doing some of the household tasks he’d been avoiding, and she showed him how to go about this. They worked out the best time of day to do this – and to vary the exercise he did so that it wasn’t all about the gym. He started to walk over rough ground to get more confident for when he went fishing again, and he got himself a little stool to sit on from time to time. Joe and his occupational therapist talked about his relationship with his partner, and they met together with her so they could share what his back pain meant, the restrictions he had, what he could do, and how else they could be intimate. Joe was encouraged to rehearse and then tell his doctor about the effect of his meds on his sex life.

The minutiae of daily life, translating what is learned in a clinic to that person’s own world is, and always has been, the province of occupational therapy. It’s just a little sad that such a prominent researcher and author hasn’t included any of this in this editorial.

Just a small sample of research in which occupational therapists are involved in RTW.

Bardo, J., Asiello, J., & Sleight, A. (2022). Supporting Health for the Long Haul: a literature synthesis and proposed occupational therapy self-management virtual group intervention for return-to-work. World Federation of Occupational Therapists Bulletin, 1-10.

Berglund, E., Anderzén, I., Andersén, Å., Carlsson, L., Gustavsson, C., Wallman, T., & Lytsy, P. (2018). Multidisciplinary intervention and acceptance and commitment therapy for return-to-work and increased employability among patients with mental illness and/or chronic pain: a randomized controlled trial. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(11), 2424.

Cullen K, Irvin E, Collie A, Clay F, Gensby U, Jennings P, Hogg-Johnson S, Kristman V, Laberge M, McKenzie D. Effectiveness of workplace interventions in return-to-work for musculoskeletal, pain-related and mental health conditions: an update of the evidence and messages for practitioners. J Occup Rehabil 2018;28:1–15.

Grant, M., Rees, S., Underwood, M. et al. Obstacles to returning to work with chronic pain: in-depth interviews with people who are off work due to chronic pain and employers. BMC Musculoskelet Disord 20, 486 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-019-2877-5

Fischer, M. R., Persson, E. B., Stålnacke, B. M., Schult, M. L., & Löfgren, M. (2019). Return to work after interdisciplinary pain rehabilitation: one-and two-year follow-up study based on the swedish quality registry for pain rehabilitation. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 51(4), 281-289.

Fischer, M. R., Schults, M. L., Stålnacke, B. M., Ekholm, J., Persson, E. B., & Löfgren, M. (2020). Variability in patient characteristics and service provision of interdisciplinary pain rehabilitation: A study using? the Swedish national quality registry for pain rehabilitation. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 52(11), 1-10.

Ibrahim, M.E., Weber, K., Courvoisier, D.S. et al. Recovering the capability to work among patients with chronic low Back pain after a four-week, multidisciplinary biopsychosocial rehabilitation program: 18-month follow-up study. BMC Musculoskelet Disord 20, 439 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-019-2831-6

Marom, B. S., Ratzon, N. Z., Carel, R. S., & Sharabi, M. (2019). Return-to-work barriers among manual workers after hand injuries: 1-year follow-up cohort study. Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation, 100(3), 422-432.

Michel, C., Guêné, V., Michon, E., Roquelaure, Y., & Petit, A. (2018). Return to work after rehabilitation in chronic low back pain workers. Does the interprofessional collaboration work?. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 32(4), 521-524

Nicholas, M.K. (in press). The biopsychosocial model of pain 40 years on: time for a reappraisal? Pain.

Scopes, roles, interprofessional practice and person-centred healthcare

A topic that almost immediately gets my hackles up is the one of scopes and roles in pain management and rehabilitation. It’s like “Oooh but that’s MY stuff, get out of it!” and I can see Gollum saying “my preciousssss”…

I trained and graduated in 1984. As a raw newbie occupational therapist I couldn’t articulate much of what my profession brought to healthcare, except that I knew “doing”, “activities” or “occupation” was important to human wellbeing, and that I’d been trained to analyse these. I’ve learned a lot since then and got a PhD in the process. Developing as people and as clinicians is, I hope, deeply embedded in us as professionals.

Interprofessional practice is a model of healthcare recommended in pain management and rehabilitation (Oslund, et al., 2009). Interdisciplinary/interprofessional teams involve different health professionals working alongside one another using their areas of expertise, but where all use a common over-arching model such as a biopsychosocial approach. Teams meet regularly to collaborate on treatment goals and priorities (Ruan & Kaye, 2016). There is limited hierarchy and extensive communication, cooperation, and overlap between team members (Körner, 2010).

True interprofessional practice is rare. Why? Because teams on paper are not teams. Teams need time together both formally and informally, stability amongst members, a pool of common knowledge as well as an understanding of what each team member brings in to the mix. Needless to say, high trust is crucial, along with ongoing communication (Zajak et al., 2021). We can’t just use professional labels to know what another profession can offer because we [should] keep on developing.

One of the largest contributors to poor interprofessional teamwork is lack of confidence. Not just lack of confidence in the skills of the other team members, but lack of confidence in one’s own professional contribution. High trust in one another, and yourself is critical.

When you’re feeling uncertain and find it hard to articulate what you bring to a team, any encroachment on “your” turf (call it scope) will likely engender a worry that you’re unnecessary. That others are “taking over” – and in turn, this can mean you search for faults in what other team members do because this helps affirm your rights and your specialness. You might want to rigidly control who does what in a team. It boosts your sense of worth but at the expense of other team members, and more importantly, at the expense of the person the team is trying to help.

The thing is, the person with pain does not care which person in a team works with them. What they care about is that the clinician is knowledgeable, and empathic. Trustworthy. The quality of the interpersonal relationship accounted for 54.5% reduction in pain in one study by Fuentes (Fuentes et al., 2014). People with pain want to know that their individual needs have been taken into account in their treatment plan (Kinney et al., 2020).

If you’re finding it hard to work in a team, perhaps feeling vulnerable about your worth, try this:

Ask your team to meet for an hour, tops.

Ask each member of your team to say what they bring to the team – not just their profession, but what else? Consider age, humour, cultural background, additional courses, personal interests outside of work, the “social secretary”, the “librarian”…and professional skills.

Pool all of these contributions on a big piece of paper – use post-it notes of different colours for each person.

Group similar contributions together in the middle of the paper – and spread unique contributions around the outside.

Review the paper and ask each participant to add any contributions they’ve just been reminded of.

Take a good look at the common contributions and the unique ones: these are what make up your team and they’re there to use for better person-centred care.

You can add some reflective questions to this activity.

• What are the areas of overlap? It could be goal-setting, offering information about pain, movement practices, addressing fear of pain/reinjury, helping build confidence…
• What areas of uniqueness are there? These could be hypnosis, knowledge translation from clinic to daily life, exercise prescription, the ability to write a prescription for medications
• What surprised you? This could be the degree of overlap, or the contribution you didn’t expect from someone, or perhaps a gap in the team’s knowledge or skills
• What shows up in yourself as you review these contributions? These could be “yeah, right, I don’t believe you can do THAT!” or “but I can do that too!”

Handling your response to what shows up to that last question is where the enormous value of this activity lies. Remember, the team is there for the person with pain, not for you as clinicians. If you think someone is claiming a contribution you can do with more skill, this only means that you can offer that person help from time to time. If you think that you’d like to contribute in an area and you didn’t add that as one of your contributions, now is the time to put it on the paper.

Take a copy of that piece of paper, and keep it close to you.

Your mission from then on, should you choose to accept it, is to review this set of contributions when you are next developing a treatment plan for a person seeking your help. Choose the combination of clinicians that offers the range of skills and knowledge, the interpersonal skills suited, and the availability of each clinician so that the person you hope to help will be seen by a team, and not just a set of individual clinicians. Oh and add in a good case formulation as well…

Remember: it’s all about the person in person-centred pain management and rehabilitation.

Fuentes J, Armijo-Olivo S, Funabashi M, Miciak M, Dick B, Warren S, Rashiq S, Magee DJ, Gross DP. (2014). Enhanced therapeutic alliance modulates pain intensity and muscle pain sensitivity in patients with chronic low back pain: An experimental controlled study. Physical Therapy. 94:477–89.

Kinney, M., Seider, J., Beaty, A. F., Coughlin, K., Dyal, M., & Clewley, D. (2020, Aug). The impact of therapeutic alliance in physical therapy for chronic musculoskeletal pain: A systematic review of the literature. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 36(8), 886-898. https://doi.org/10.1080/09593985.2018.1516015

Körner, M. (2010). Interprofessional teamwork in medical rehabilitation: a comparison of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary team approach. Clinical Rehabilitation, 24(8), 745-755. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269215510367538

Oslund, S., Robinson, R. C., Clark, T. C., Garofalo, J. P., Behnk, P., Walker, B., Walker, K. E., Gatchel, R. J., Mahaney, M., & Noe, C. E. (2009). Long-term effectiveness of a comprehensive pain management program: strengthening the case for interdisciplinary care. Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 22(3), 211-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/08998280.2009.11928516

Ruan, X., & Kaye, A. D. (2016). A Call for Saving Interdisciplinary Pain Management. Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 46(12), 1021-1023. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2016.0611

Wampold, B. E. (2018). The Therapeutic Value of the Relationship for Placebo Effects and Other Healing Practices. International Review of Neurobiology, 139, 191-210. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.irn.2018.07.019

Zajac, S., Woods, A., Tannenbaum, S., Salas, E., & Holladay, C. L. (2021). Overcoming Challenges to Teamwork in Healthcare: A Team Effectiveness Framework and Evidence-Based Guidance. Frontiers in Communication, 6(6). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.606445

The complex world of identifying nociplastic pains

Towards the end of 2017, IASP put forward a new mechanistic classification: nociplastic pain. The definition is: “Pain that arises from altered nociception despite no clear evidence of actual or threatened tissue damage causing the activation of peripheral nociceptors or evidence for disease or lesion of the somatosensory system causing the pain.

Note: Patients can have a combination of nociceptive and nociplastic pain”.

This was great news! Prior to this, the term “central sensitisation” was used and abused to describe processes involved in ongoing pain that wasn’t inflammatory or neuropathic. Problem with that term is that it’s apparent in nociceptive mechanisms, as well as both inflammatory and neuropathic…. When the way people used the term was more akin to “well, the pain hasn’t settled down, so ‘something weird’ is going on and it must be in the central nervous system so we’ll adopt this term seeing as Clifford Woolf described it in the spinal cord” (Woolf, 1996, 2007).

In other words, any pain that seemed to radiate, hang around, and no respond to treatment was “centrally sensitised”. Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Suffice to say, people got confused because most of the typical central sensitisation from nociceptive/inflammatory processes subsides over time, but these “centrally sensitised” pains did not.

I, for one, am glad there’s a group in which weird pains that don’t appear to involve typical nociceptive, inflammatory or neuropathic mechanisms can be put.

Problem is: how do we know what fits into this group? We can be pretty certain when it comes to neuropathic pain, because the definition is very clear (though not so clear in the clinic) – “Pain caused by a lesion or disease of the somatosensory nervous system.” The notes go on to say that “neuropathic pain is a description, not a diagnosis” and I’d say the same about nociplastic pains (which is why I use the plural…). I also step out to say that I don’t think ALL nociplastic pains will be found to have the same biological mechanisms, especially given how widely variable neuropathic pains are.

Nevertheless, we need some way to decide which pains are in, and which are out of this group.

This table comes from Kosek et al., (2021) and summarises the findings from a consensus process within an expert group. They make the point that acute pain isn’t helpfully included in this group, and instead it should be used for pains that persist for 3 months or longer. They also point out that regional pain is included while discrete pain is typically not because of the central sensitisation processes involved (note: this is the correct use of the term! Confused? CS is a neurophysiological phenomenon, associated with more than nociplastic pain).

Looking at the above criteria, possible nociplastic pain is present if the person has criteria 1, and criteria 4. Probable nociplastic is present if the person has all the above.

There are some notes, of course: regional means the musculoskeletal pain is deep, regional or in several places or even widespread (not localised to one place), and each condition eg frozen shoulder and OA knee needs to be assessed separately. If there is an identifiable nociceptive source (or neuropathic source) then the pain needs to be more widespread than “usual” for that pathology. Finally, because nociplastic pain unlike neuropathic pain, has no definitive test currently, there is no “definite nociplastic” category – but once there is, this will be added.

What does this mean for us as clinicians?

Firstly it ought to stop people being thought as faking, malingering or otherwise not being believed. That should be a given but unsurprisingly because of legal and health systems and our own frustration at not being able to “fix” people, people with pain get that impression more often than they should. It also ought to stop psychopathologising people who have this kind of pain: we can’t distinguish between people with nociplastic pain and the DSM5 “Somatic Disorder” – so let’s just not add another unhelpful mental health label to what is already a stigmatised situation.

Then it ought to stop clinicians using treatments that simply don’t help – such as opioids for fibromyalgia. It might help clinicians pause before prescribing movement therapies at a level that is too intense for the person, because this only revs the nervous system up even more making the whole process unpleasant. Beginning at the level the person can manage and gradually increasing is crucial to success. And it ought to stop clinicians from administering “explanations” or “education” and expecting that alone to reduce pain. Because while cortical processes are part and parcel of every pain there is, it’s in this group of pains that some people think “top down” by thinking yourself out of pain is a thing. FWIW pain reduction is lovely and part of treatment, but shouldn’t ever be the only outcome (Ballantyne, 2015), and many times in this group of pains, may not even be an outcome.

Finally, it should stimulate helpful discussion about what “whole person” approaches to managing these pains looks like. The authors say “patients with nociplastic pain are likely to respond better to centrally than peripherally targeted therapies” and this does not mean talk therapy alone, or exercise alone, or indeed medications such as gabapentin or nortriptyline alone. To me, it means individualised, tailored, and integrated strategies to moving, managing daily life, restoring sleep, enjoying an intimate relationship, managing mood and memory, and these might best be offered by pain coaches rather than siloed “therapies” of physical, psychological or whatever other stripe there is.

Ballantyne, J. C., & Sullivan, M. D. (2015). Intensity of Chronic Pain — The Wrong Metric? New England Journal of Medicine, 373(22), 2098-2099. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1507136

Kosek, E., Clauw, D., Nijs, J., Baron, R., Gilron, I., Harris, R. E., Mico, J.-A., Rice, A. S. C., & Sterling, M. (2021). Chronic nociplastic pain affecting the musculoskeletal system: clinical criteria and grading system. Pain, 162(11), 2629-2634. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002324

Woolf, C. J. (1996). Windup and central sensitization are not equivalent. Pain, 66(2), 105-108.

Woolf, C. J. (2007). Central sensitization: uncovering the relation between pain and plasticity. The Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, 106(4), 864-867.

Rehab Fails: What goes wrong in rehab 4

It’s not hard to choose rehab fails, the problem is more about when to stop! I tell a lie, it’s more about how to make changes so these things don’t happen.

Today’s #rehabfail is all about attempting to carve bits of a person off so each profession gets “their” bit to do with what they will. Oh boy, this is a doozy, and it comes to me off the back of seeing the return of the age-old argument about whether pain is “all about the bio” or whether the person gets a look-in. Cuz if it’s all bio then we just treat that bio and be done with it, right? It’s a question that also arises when we begin to ask questions about what the person understands about their pain and disability, when they <gasp!> show that they’re frustrated, demoralised, maybe sad or grieving for what they can’t do….

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say “oh but I’m stepping out of scope” – usually in response to a suggestion that they incorporate cognitive behavioural principles in their work, or when someone says it might be a good idea to look into psychosocial factors – I would be wealthy and retired. I cannot believe how often therapists with a primarily physical orientation seem to think that asking someone how they’re feeling about their situation, what they understand might be going on, what they prefer, how they’re sleeping, how they’re getting on with their family… ALL these things is “out of scope!”

Seriously folks. Since when did being a human communicating to another human about how they are in the face of pain and disability turn into a “OOooh but I’m not a psychologist” kind of fear? Who else is going to be able to guide someone to a psychologist unless it’s the insightful clinician who is sensitive to when someone is feeling pretty rotten?

Another part of this chasm between “mind” and “body” is the idea that psychosocial factors are only relevant if or when the person “fails” therapy. Who failed, huh? And where did the idea that psychosocial factors are all negative come from? We all have psychosocial factors in our lives: our temperament, memories, assumptions, relationships, goals, routines, job, choices are all psychosocial, and some of them are even pretty positive!

The siloing of professions particularly in musculoskeletal pain rehabilitation is one of the least helpful things I’ve seen in health. The second is to have a “team on paper” where the “team” members do exactly the same things they do when working as a solo practitioner. Serial monotherapy does nothing for people living with pain. What I mean by this is every doing their therapy concurrently but failing to talk to one another, failing to modify what they do to suit the overall needs of the person, failing to have a common understanding of what one another do, and failing to support one another. How confusing is that for the person getting treatment?

Now I am not suggesting that psychologists should become physiotherapists, or occupational therapists become pharmacists, or even a full transprofessional approach (though this is something our NZ health ministry is aiming for over time). I am simply suggesting these things:

1. Know that whole people are seeking help, not a knee or a belly pain or a back. Pains are experienced by people.
2. Be human and listen to (and ask about) human things like: how is your job going? what’s your sleep like at the moment? what do you think is going on with your pain, what is your theory? how are you feeling in yourself at the moment? Open-ended questions about human experiences and habits – and follow up with more open-ended questions, and lots of reflective statements. Do this from day one. For everyone.
3. Take some time to sit in with someone from a different profession. Make friends with them. Go have a coffee with them. See how they work with someone in common. Let them know this isn’t so you can be them, but so you can help your patients/clients understand a bit more about what seeing them might look like.
4. Read about “whole person rehabilitation.” Matt Erb and Arlene Schmid’s book is awesome (and not just because I wrote a chapter in it! So did a heap of people! – click.)
5. Dip your toe into understanding your patient’s life. Ask questions that help you understand how they’ve made the decisions they have. Nobody gets up in the morning to do dumb things that might hurt them: there are logical reasons – to them – for why they do what they do. We just need to get our heads around their reasons to begin to tease out the assumptions they hold (and we hold) that have influenced their choices. Remember we all do this.
6. Never, ever think that you’re treating a back, or a knee, or a headache or a belly pain. You are always working with a person who is experiencing pain in a part of their body, and that pain has enough meaning for them to decide to ask for help. That’s what we’re actually working with.

Here are some readings discussing how we might build teamwork and whole person rehabilitation:

Bashir, U., & Siddiqui, A. S. (2021). Teamwork in chronic pain management and the way forward in low and middle-income countries. Anaesthesia, Pain & Intensive Care, 25(2). https://doi.org/10.35975/apic.v25i2.1477

Cartmill, C., Soklaridis, S., & David Cassidy, J. (2011, Mar). Transdisciplinary teamwork: the experience of clinicians at a functional restoration program. J Occup Rehabil, 21(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-010-9247-3

Cassell, E. J. (2011). Suffering, whole person care, and the goals of medicine. In T. A. E. Hutchinson (Ed.), Whole person care: A new paradigm for the 21st century (pp. 9-22). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9440-0

Gordon, D. B., Watt-Watson, J., & Hogans, B. B. (2018). Interprofessional pain education-with, from, and about competent, collaborative practice teams to transform pain care. Pain Reports, 3(3), e663. https://doi.org/10.1097/PR9.0000000000000663

Griffin, H., & Hay-Smith, E. J. C. (2019). Characteristics of a well-functioning chronic pain team: A systematic review. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 47(1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15619/NZJP/47.1.02

Maynard, M. T., & Gilson, L. L. (2021). Getting to know you: The importance of familiarity in virtual teams. Organizational Dynamics, 50(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2021.100844

Mallick-Searle, T., Sharma, K., Toal, P., & Gutman, A. (2021). Pain and Function in Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain-Treating the Whole Person. J Multidiscip Healthc, 14, 335-347. https://doi.org/10.2147/JMDH.S288401

Rehab Fails: What goes wrong in pain rehabilitation 3

I’m beginning to think this series could grow into a monster – so many #rehabfails to pick from!

Today’s post is about rehabilitation that doesn’t fit into the person’s life. Or that the person hasn’t been supported to fit the rehabilitation into their life. THEIR life, not ours!

You know what I mean: for six to twelve weeks, this person has been coming along to their treatment sessions, doing the things the therapist suggests. They make progress and it’s time to end the programme. “Good bye patient” the therapist says. And the patient skips off into the sunset, fixed for life.

Yeah right.

Roll that movie right back to the start.

At the first consultation, therapists often ask the person about what they’d like to achieve. Often the person doesn’t really know, after all most people don’t routinely set goals – and particularly if someone is experiencing the disruption of dealing with a painful problem that doesn’t go away like it should. It’s not for nothing that people describe this time as being in “zombie land” and dealing only with “the essentials” (Lennox Thompson, et al, 2019). Nevertheless, therapists ask and people are expected to come up with something that can then form the focus of subsequent therapy. A recent systematic review, however, found that many studies describing goal setting practices fail to implement all the components of effective goal setting – in particular, omitting “formulation of coping plan” and “follow up” (Kang, et al, 2022).

Now these two components are crucial for long-term adherence to rehabilitation, and especially in persisting pain where it’s probable the person will need to follow therapeutic practices for a very long time. The “coping plan” consists of identifying barriers and facilitators to doing the actions that lead to achieving goals, and also involves assessing confidence to do so, along with generating a plan to deal with unexpected situations. “Follow up” involves self-evaluating progress, evaluation, and adjusting the plan to suit. (Kang et al., 2022).

Why are these two components so important?

Well, think of one of your recent patients. Think about the things you (and others in your clinical team) asked that person to do. Are any of these things typical for this person? Are they habits, built into daily routines? Are they familiar? What is this person’s daily routine like? What does their family need to do and what does this person need to do for them? If the person usually works, and is still trying to maintain that on top of their usual home and family activities, how much are you and your colleagues asking the person to do on top of these? When they’re already struggling with the debilitating effects of their pain problem?

See why we might have trouble with adherence? Let alone ensuring that the person feels it’s worthwhile doing what it is we’re asking them to do!

I’ve seen this problem time and time again. Little, if any, consideration of this person’s usual daily life context. Little thought to the burden of trying to manage normal life and what the therapists is asking the person to do. No discussion about what might get in the way of fitting these therapy things into their life – and then I’ve heard clinicians have the audacity to suggest the person isn’t motivated!

So much for person centred rehabilitation. So much for helping the person work out how they might fit these things in, and how they might develop a routine or habit that they can continue once they leave the therapist’s care.

While I’ve looked at goal setting and therapy for persistent pain, what I notice is that even in acute musculoskeletal management, studies have shown that therapists don’t really understand goal setting. Alexanders and colleagues (2021) found that physiotherapists undertaking goal setting for anterior cruciate ligament rehabilitation might employ SMART goals – but didn’t understand the theory behind goal setting, didn’t know that expectations were important, and didn’t use feedback sufficiently. And this is for SMART goals that have already been found wanting (see Swann et al., 2022).

What do I suggest?

1. Start by understanding the person’s current responsibilities in life, and the impact their pain problem is having. Recognise that those impacts will also have an impact on their capability for adding to their daily routine.
2. With the person, establish the best time of day for them to do whatever it is you think they should do. Work through what might get in the way – and what might support them.
3. You may need to help them develop some additional skills to deal with what might get in the way of undertaking your activities – maybe skills to communicate with family, or the boss, so they can take 10 minutes out to do the breathing practice you’ve suggested, maybe some work with thoughts to help them be OK with guilt for “not doing things as normal.”
4. Assess their confidence to engage in this additional task. Use motivational interviewing to boost their confidence (and it probably would help you to consider the importance of what you’re asking them to do in the context of their values and activities).
5. Check how much you’re asking the person to do – is it achievable in this person’s life? A certain intensity might be theoretically important for physiology, but if the person doesn’t do it because he or she can’t fit it in, it just won’t get done.
6. Check in with the person in between appointments. If you see them once a week – send a text 3 days in to that week to see how they’re getting on. Or ask the person if they’ll send you a text to let you know. Give feedback, alter your plan, encourage, celebrate.
7. And once the person is nearly ready for discharge, make sure you have a set-back or relapse prevention plan in place. What should this person do if things begin to go pear-shaped? Do they need to keep going at the same intensity as they have during your therapy? What are their warning signs for things beginning to fall apart? (clue: it’s often not when people are beginning to hurt again, it’s often because the person is feeling good and starts to drop the things that have helped!)

Don’t do #rehabfails

Kang, E., Kim, M. Y., Lipsey, K. L., & Foster, E. R. (2022). Person-Centered Goal Setting: A Systematic Review of Intervention Components and Level of Active Engagement in Rehabilitation Goal-Setting Interventions. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabiltation, 103(1), 121-130 e123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2021.06.025

Lennox Thompson, B., Gage, J., & Kirk, R. (2019). Living well with chronic pain: a classical grounded theory. Disability and Rehabilitation, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2018.1517195

Lenzen SA, Daniels R, van Bokhoven MA, van der Weijden T, Beurskens A. (2017). Disentangling self-management goal setting and action planning: a scoping review. PloS One,12:e0188822.

Swann, C., Jackman, P. C., Lawrence, A., Hawkins, R. M., Goddard, S. G., Williamson, O., Schweickle, M. J., Vella, S. A., Rosenbaum, S., & Ekkekakis, P. (2022, Jan 31). The (over)use of SMART goals for physical activity promotion: A narrative review and critique. Health Psychology Review, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2021.2023608

What goes wrong in pain rehabilitation (2)

One size does not fit all. Cookie cutter treatments fail to take into account the huge variability each person brings into a clinical encounter, particularly when the person is living with persisting pain. Not really earth shattering news, is it?!

Let me unpack this one.

When we’re treating a person with an acute musculoskeletal injury, let’s say a lateral ankle sprain, I’m going to hazard a guess that most of the recovery occurs without our assistance (don’t shoot the messenger – go read Chen et al, 2019). In essence, we’re creating an environment that supports tissues to do what they do well – get on with healing. Because of this, there’s good reason to follow a basic treatment algorithm that will work for most people. That is, unless or until recovery stops for some reason.

It’s here that algorithms begin to lose utility, because the factors that are implicated in delayed recovery are many and varied – and it’s important to narrow down the particular factors involved for this person with their ankle.

So, IMHO, cookie cutter treatments begin to fall apart when recovery is slower than expected because there are a heap of variables involved. And yet what do I see? “Oh it failed but let’s do the same thing again but harder!” or “the person wasn’t doing their exercises” or “it must be psychosocial factors.”

Well, no, actually, perhaps psychosocial factors are involved, but they were there from the outset (just ignored because the tissue-based factors capture our attention). And no, doing the same thing again but harder leads to the same outcome, only more disappointing. And we have no idea whether the person was, or wasn’t doing their exercises – or whether the prescribed exercises were useful, or whether they even make much of a difference anyway! (again, don’t shoot the messenger, go read Wagemans, et al 2022).

But probably the most heartbreaking thing about using “one size fits all” is that this doesn’t take into account this person’s goals, lifestyle, current priorities, other contextual factors like workplace, family and friendship obligations that are integral to being a person, not just a lateral ankle sprain.

I once worked at a chronic pain centre where every person was assessed by three clinicians: a medical practitioner for diagnosis and medication management; a psychosocial clinician to understand life stressors and the person’s understanding of their pain and their current coping strategies; and a person who assessed how he or she was managing with daily life and functional activities. What I couldn’t understand was how almost every patient was given the same management plan: to try some drugs, see a psychologist, and do a home exercise programme. Come to the centre to see each clinician on a different day of the week. Irrespective of the unique presentation, the same recipe was given. The ingredients might have been a little different when the person was seen for treatment, but without fail, the basic elements were exactly the same.

How is this person-centred care? What if this person was a 4 wheeldrive off-roading enthusiast who loved to go fishing? What if this person was a traveling sales rep with a well-developed meditation practice? What if this person had five kids and couldn’t get to the pain centre for the twice weekly appointments? What if this person was hankering after spending some time with other people who were also living with pain so she could hear that she wasn’t alone, and could pick up tips from people who knew what it was like?

Today I still hear of people being given a copy of “Explain Pain”, get to do the “Protectometer” and then told to go see the physio and psychologist. Nothing about the person’s desire to work out the impact pain has on their daily life, nothing about the understanding the person already has about their own pain fluctuations, and nothing that’s tailored to what this person needs and wants to do.

Seriously folks, pain rehabilitation and management is all about tailored, bespoke, clever therapy based on what the person needs and wants to do, what they already know and bring to their own recovery, and it probably needs to include connection with other people who are in the same situation. Why? Because while “other people” might not give the advice the journal articles recommend, they offer advice from their own experience. And mostly, people with persisting pain need affirmation that they’re resilient, capable, knowledgeable and can work a way through this.

Maybe what we need to do is include people who live with pain in service design (Sandvin Olsson, et al., 2020) – and pain management delivery (Farr, et al., 2021). It seems to work.

Chen, E. , McInnis, K. & Borg-Stein, J. (2019). Ankle Sprains: Evaluation, Rehabilitation, and Prevention. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 18 (6), 217-223. doi: 10.1249/JSR.0000000000000603.

Farr, M., Brant, H., Patel, R., Linton, M. J., Ambler, N., Vyas, S., Wedge, H., Watkins, S., & Horwood, J. (2021, Dec 11). Experiences of Patient-Led Chronic Pain Peer Support Groups After Pain Management Programs: A Qualitative Study. Pain Med, 22(12), 2884-2895. https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnab189

Sandvin Olsson, A. B., Strom, A., Haaland-Overby, M., Fredriksen, K., & Stenberg, U. (2020, Aug). How can we describe impact of adult patient participation in health-service development? A scoping review. Patient Educ Couns, 103(8), 1453-1466. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2020.02.028

Wagemans, J., Bleakley, C., Taeymans, J., Schurz, A. P., Kuppens, K., Baur, H., & Vissers, D. (2022). Exercise-based rehabilitation reduces reinjury following acute lateral ankle sprain: A systematic review update with meta-analysis. PLoS One, 17(2)http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262023