Persistent pain and movement practices

Here I go, stepping into “the bio” to write about movement. Oh dear, what am I doing?

Movement practices of various kinds are part and parcel of pain management. In fact, to read some of the material in social media-land, exercise is the be-all and end-all of pain management, maybe with a dash of psychology. Can we please stop doing this?

I’ve said it often, for many forms of persistent pain, especially the most common forms – nonspecific chronic low back pain, fibromyalgia, and osteoarthritic pain – movement is a good thing, but the effect sizes are small for both pain intensity and disability (eg Jayden, et al., 2021). I’ve reproduced the author’s conclusions below:

We found moderate‐certainty evidence that exercise is probably effective for treatment of chronic low back pain compared to no treatment, usual care or placebo for pain. The observed treatment effect for the exercise compared to no treatment, usual care or placebo comparisons is small for functional limitations, not meeting our threshold for minimal clinically important difference. We also found exercise to have improved pain (low‐certainty evidence) and functional limitations outcomes (moderate‐certainty evidence) compared to other conservative treatments; however, these effects were small and not clinically important when considering all comparisons together. Subgroup analysis suggested that exercise treatment is probably more effective than advice or education alone, or electrotherapy, but with no differences observed for manual therapy treatments.

So for chronic low back pain, short-term pain intensity reduction is clinically significant, but neither functional limitations nor pain intensity reductions over the long-term reached clinical significance. Ouch! This means that we must not oversell the usefulness of exercise as a panacea for chronic pain.

Some missing bits in this meta-analysis: how many people carried on doing their exercise programmes? Why did they keep on going if they didn’t experience reduced pain or better function? How many people dropped out from follow-up?

But my biggest question is “Why does increased physical fitness and reduced pain not translate into better function in daily life?” And of course, my next question is “What might improve the daily life outcomes for people with pain?”

I might also ask why there is so much emphasis on exercise as an approach for chronic pain? Why oh why? One reason could be the assumptions made about the reasons people have trouble with daily life activities. A reasonable assumption might be that people are unfit. Another might be that people don’t have confidence to move. But if these assumptions were true, we’d see better results than this. Perhaps we need to be much more sophisticated and begin to explore what really does impact a person’s daily life activities? My plea therefore is that we cease doing RCTs comparing exercises of various forms to placebo, no treatment or usual care. Please. We know movement is a good thing, and with the enormous number of studies carried out, surely we can stop now?!*

Here are some clinical reasoning pointers when employing movement practices. I’m being agnostic with respect to what form of movement practice [insert your favourite here].

• Find out what the person enjoys doing for movement/exercise. Aim to do this, or build towards doing this. Start low and build up intensity, load and frequency.
• Find out why the person has stopped doing their movement/exercise practice. If pain has stopped them, be curious about what they think is going on, what they think the pain means, what happens if they experience pain doing their favourite movement practice, and find out how long and how much they’ve done before pain stops them. Then address unhelpful beliefs, re-set the starting point and progress in a gentle graded way.
• If the person hasn’t ever been a movement/exercise person, be curious about why. Explore this in detail – beliefs about movement, movement practices they’ve tried, time available, cost, all the things that might get in the way of doing a movement practice. You might find it was a high school physical ed. practice that totally put them off – but look beyond “exercise” or “sports” and remember that movement includes walking, dancing, gardening, playing with the dog, fishing, kayaking….

When you’re starting to generate a movement practice programme, for goodness sake ask the person when they’re going to find time to do it, and don’t make it too long! Explore when might be the most convenient time, and what might make it easy to do. Use low cost, low-tech practices. Find out what might get in the way of doing the movement practice, and do some problem-solving – anticipate what goes through a person’s mind and together, come up with counter-arguments or better, think of some really important values that might underpin the reason to do what is undoubtedly difficult for this person in their life.

Think about life-long habits and routines. How might this person explore options that could fit into their life as they get older? What might they do if the weather is bad, or they have an addition to the family? How many different movement practices can you and the person think of? And remember, if it’s OK for a person at a gym to do “leg day” one day, and “arm day” another, it’s perfectly fine for someone to do gardening one day, and go for a walk up the hill the next. Don’t be boring! Invite exploration and variety.

Work on translating the movement practices you and the person do in clinic into the daily life movements the person is having trouble doing. This might mean asking the person about their daily life and what’s most difficult for them to do right now. If it’s bending to load/unload the dishwasher, ask them what’s going on, what comes up for them when they do this? Is the problem about physical capability – or is it because it’s at the end of a long day at work, they’re tired and haven’t been sleeping and they’re worrying about how the pain in their back is going to affect their sleep tonight? If it’s the latter – guess what, physical exercise isn’t going to change this! So talk about what they can do to help with their sleep, or if that’s not your forte, talk to another team member (occupational therapist, psychologist) about what might help.

Note that as clinicians, we have no right to dictate what a person’s life looks like. This means we can’t judge a person for their choice of movement practice. We also can’t dictate how often or how intense their “workout” should be. It’s going to vary, depending on all the things this person in front of you values most. And we must respect this – don’t be judgemental, their values may be very different from yours, and this is perfectly OK. Just help them explore the good – and not so good – of their choices.

Finally, don’t be afraid to have fun with movement! Play a little. If disc golf is the person’s thing – go try it out! If jive dance is their thing, maybe it’s time you gave that a go. If they like hiking to a quiet spot to do a little bird photography, go with them and carry your own camera gear. If their life is so busy that movement practice gets squeezed out, work with them to find ways to get movement snacks into their day. Don’t be boring. And worry a little less about “prescribing” movement, and much more about experiencing your body as a living sensory being – get in the moment and enjoy what your body is able to do. That is really what we’re encouraging in movement practices for chronic pain.

*A couple of other guesses for why exercise gets seen as The Best Thing – it’s “cheap” in comparison with other options, people can do it reasonably easily after therapy, there are LOTS of physiotherapists and others who offer this, it appeals to our “simple” (but wrong) beliefs about pain, psychological approaches are more expensive (though don’t offer better outcomes), daily life occupational therapy approaches are really hard to conduct as RCTs….

Hayden JA, Ellis J, Ogilvie R, Malmivaara A, van Tulder MW. Exercise therapy for chronic low back pain. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2021, Issue 9. Art. No.: CD009790. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD009790.pub2. Accessed 18 December 2022.

Frustration in the clinic

I’m prompted to write this post because it’s something I see in social media so often – a clinician gets frustrated. Things don’t work. The person getting treatment doesn’t respond in the way that was expected. The person doesn’t look like what the clinician usually sees. The evidence doesn’t fit with practice. All the things! So I thought today I’d write about emotions and thoughts that might turn up – and what might underlie those feelings. (For people living with pain – we also have frustration in the clinic. Things don’t work out. The therapist isn’t what we expected. I’ll write more about this soon!)

Emotions are a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements (https://dictionary.apa.org/emotion). From a cognitive behavioural perspective, an event happens, we appraise it (judge it), and we experience an emotion – then we do something as a response. It’s much more complex than this, and each part interacts with the others – so we end up with a big diagram looking something like this: (from – https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cognitive-behavioral-therapy-model-of-depression_fig1_338695579).

Instead of “depressive”, just put in “beliefs/expectations about who I am and what I can expect from myself”. This is a pretty generic model in CBT, and is well-established even if there are plenty of arguments about accuracy and adequacy!

Clinicians generally want to help. Yes, some are in it for fame or fortune (choose something else, kthx), but on the whole people enter a clinical profession because they think they can do some good, and people will “get better.” Our communities hold long-standing expectations about what seeing a health professional should entail: read Benedetti’s “The Patient’s Brain” for a much more detailed description of the historical and evolutionary basis for a therapeutic encounter.

Why does this matter? Because it sets the scene for how we think a therapeutic encounter should go.

Rules and assumptions about what “ought” to, or “should” happen often underlie emotions.

We’re happy when all the things line up and the patient does what we expect of patients while the clinician does things that work. When things don’t go to plan (ie our expectations are violated) that’s when we get some feelings, and they can be pretty big.

What do we expect from patients?

Despite moves towards person-centred care where patients are seen as people and clinicians offer options rather than dictate orders, our societies still hold expectations about the roles a patient and a clinician should play.

Patients are expected to seek help when they’re sick. They’re expected to be truthful about their symptoms, and tell clinicians everything that is relevant about their condition – AND about any other aspect of their health, even if it’s not immediately relevant to their current problem. Symptoms experienced by patients are expected to be what the clinician expects, and the disease a patient has should fit within “typical” parameters (usually based on males). Patients are also expected to follow instructions, not do things that go against instructions, and of course, to get better. Patients are meant to be grateful for their treatment, even if it’s disruptive, has unpleasant side effects, or isn’t 100% effective. Patients should do their best all the time.

As a corollary, clinicians have a huge number of expectations they take on (and are given!). Some of us have these explicitly handed to us during our training, while others find they’re an implicit set of assumptions that we adopt, perhaps in the guise of “being professional.”

What do we expect from clinicians?

Clinicians expect to be in control in the clinical encounter. We’re expected to know what to ask about, and from this, what to test for. We’re expected to have the answers, and be right. We’re also expected to be calm, caring and focused – even when our personal lives are topsy-turvy. We’re meant to know what the patient wants, and how to give that to them. We’re also expected to be up-to-date, do no harm, change our practice according to evidence (even when that evidence is contradictory, or just emerging), and to stay interested in our work even if we’ve been doing it for years.

We’re expected to know our scope of practice, but practice using a broad “whole person” framework even if we were never trained to do this. We think we should be compassionate and caring, even if we were selected for training on the basis of our academic prowess and not on emotional literacy. We must take on responsibility for outcomes, even though we’re not there to “make sure” the patient “does what they’re told” in their own time. We assume when we tell someone to do something, they’ll drop everything in their life to do it – because their health should matter most, and even when other things in their life matter more.

Clinicians can be expected to practice independently from the moment they qualify, and are either “right” or “wrong” and never shades of in between. Clinicians expect that if something goes wrong, and the person doesn’t get better, it’s either the person’s fault (they didn’t do what they should have done), or the clinician has done something wrong and made a wrong diagnosis, or chosen the wrong treatment (or the treatment was right but the intensity was wrong…. so just do it again). And clinicians shouldn’t ask for emotional help because that means they’re “too emotionally invested” or “not distanced enough.”

Expectations suck

We all have them. And the ones I’ve listed above, while not always present, often underpin the way we expect clinical encounters to go. Many of them are implicit, so we don’t even realise we hold them – until BAM! Something goes wrong.

When expectations are violated, we feel emotions and some of these can be pretty strong. Many are less strong, just little niggles, little irritations, a bit of cynicism, some disappointment, some frustration. And they go both ways: people seeking help, and people trying to help. Over time, violated expectations feel like your head hitting against a brick wall, or swimming against the tide, or just plain demoralisation or even burnout.

Ways through them

Some of us have professionally-endorsed support systems to help us. Occupational therapists and psychologists have mandatory clinical supervision with someone who is there for you, who supports your development as a clinician, who challenges your assumptions, who pokes and prods at your reactions, who encourages taking a broader view. Individual clinicians in other professions may also pick up on using supervision in this way.

Some of us don’t have that kind of support. So we seek it elsewhere – I suppose, in part, I started writing this blog those years ago to “find my tribe.” Social media is one way we get affirmation, validation and even (sometimes!) great ideas to help us shift our approach.

Some clinicians leave their profession, do something else that’s more lucrative and less emotional effort. Some move out of practice and into academia. Some use “outside work” interests to blow off steam, or give emotional space.

Some of us are a little fused with the assumptions we hold. It’s hard to create a little space around those assumptions, because they’re held so tightly (or they’re so deeply buried). When we do get a tap on the shoulder suggesting our beliefs are out of whack it can feel so terribly humiliating, so inherently WRONG that we shut off, or bite back.

Creating “wiggle room”

Slowing down is a good way to begin creating some space to feel what is showing up when we’re feeling frustration. This could be by taking one or two minutes at the end of a session to be present. Yes, a little mindfulness to notice what is present in the body. To be OK with being aware of emotions, thoughts, and body sensations. NOT TO CHANGE THEM! To simply be with them. (An explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9NkUomOO_w). This helps in many ways, but it does not (and isn’t intended to) reduce them. It helps you notice that you’re having feelings. It helps you pay attention to your own state of mind. It can create a moment to ask yourself “I wonder why I feel this way?” It can help you be more present with the next person you see because you’re not carrying those feelings into the next encounter.

Reflective practice is another way to create some space to be human, feel things, be curious about why they happen, and check in with your own values. A great resource that’s freely available is Positive Professional practice: a strength-based reflective practice teaching model – it might be a ‘teaching’ model, but clinicians teach All The Time!

Taking small steps, making small changes

The first step towards making a change is knowing that it’s needed. And the second is knowing that it’s possible. The third? Knowing what to do. I hope these suggestions help a little in this seldom-discussed aspect of practice. My own preference is to question WHY do we hold these expectations? WHO made them a thing? WHAT purpose do they serve? WHEN might those expectations be a good thing – and when might they not? WHERE can we nudge just a little to make change? And preferably, as clinicians, I think it’s OUR job to make the adjustments because we’re not ill or sore or seeking help.

Some references:

Dobkin, P. L., Bernardi, N. F., & Bagnis, C. I. (2016). Enhancing Clinicians’ Well-Being and Patient-Centered Care Through Mindfulness. Journal of Continuing Education in Health Professions, 36(1), 11-16. https://doi.org/10.1097/CEH.0000000000000021

Huft, J. (2022). The History and Future of the Sociology of Therapy: a Review and a Research Agenda. The American Sociologist, 53(3), 437-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09534-3

McGarry, J., Aubeeluck, A., & De Oliveira, D. (2019). Evaluation of an evidence-based model of safeguarding clinical supervision within one healthcare organization in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 17 Suppl 1, S29-S31. https://doi.org/10.1097/XEB.0000000000000180

Spencer, K. L. (2018). Transforming Patient Compliance Research in an Era of Biomedicalization. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 59(2), 170-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146518756860

The demise of practical pain management

Cast your mind back to the last time you decided to create a new habit. It might have been to eat more healthy food, to do daily mindfulness, to go for a walk each day. Something you chose, something you decided when, where and how you did it, something that you thought would be a great addition to your routine.

How did it go? How long did it take to become a habit you didn’t need to deliberately think about? How did you organise the rest of your life to create room for this new habit? What did other people say about you doing this?

While we all know a reasonable amount about motivation for change – importance and confidence being the two major drivers – and as clinicians most of us are in the business of helping people to make changes that we hope will become habitual, have you ever stopped to think about what we ask people with pain to do?

It’s not just “do some exercise”, it’s often “and some mindfulness”, and “you could probably eat more healthily”, and “organise your activities so you can pace them out” – and “take these medications at this and this time”, “attend these appointments”, “think about things differently”… the list continues.

Now, for a moment, cast your mind back to the last few research papers you read, maybe even a textbook of pain management, the most recent course you went on, the latest CPD.

Was there anything at all on how people with pain integrate all of these things into their life?

Lewis et al., (2019) reviewed inpatient pain management programmes over 5 decades. They found 104 studies spanning from 1970’s to 2010’s. Unsurprisingly the content, format and clinicians involved in these programmes has changed – but you might be surprised at some other changes… Lewis and colleagues found that physiotherapy (primarily exercise) remained at similar levels over time, but programmes gradually became less operant conditioning-based (ie behavioural reinforcement with a focus on changing behaviour) to become more cognitive behavioural (working with thoughts and beliefs, often without necessarily including real world behaviour change), with reduced emphasis on reducing medications and less family involvement. While the same numbers of physiotherapists, doctors and psychologists remain, nurses and occupational therapists are decreasingly involved.

What’s the problem with this? Isn’t this what the research tells us is “evidence-based”?

Let’s think for a moment about effect sizes in chronic pain. They’re small across all modalities when we look at outcomes across a group. There are some gaps in our understanding of what, and how, pain management programmes “work”. We know that movement is a good thing – but effect sizes are small. We don’t know how many people maintain their exercise programmes even six months after discharge. We also don’t know how well movements taught in a clinic transfer into daily life contexts, especially where fear and avoidance are being targeted. We don’t know who, if anyone, carries on using mindfulness, cognitive strategies such as thought reframing or reality testing, and we don’t know many people leave a programme thinking they’ve been told their pain is “in their head” (though, to be fair, this is something we’ve had problems with for at least the 30 years I’ve been doing this work!).

So while assessment might be more “holistic” and outcomes more likely to be about quality of life and disability, the minutiae of how people with persistent pain integrate and synthesise what they learn in pain management programmes into their own life contexts is invisible. It’s not even part of many pain management programmes.

We could turn to the qualitative literature for some insights. Mathias et al., (2014) interviewed people two weeks after completing a programme. Munday et al., (2021) selected people toward the end of a three week programme. Farr et al., (2021) talked to people up to 24 months after a programme – but in the context of a peer-led support group (which, by the way, I think are marvellous!), Penney et al., (2019) interviewed veterans to identify outcomes, barriers and facilitators to ongoing pain management – but don’t indicate how long after a programme their participants were interviewed. So we don’t know what pain management strategies “stick” and remain in use, integrated into daily life.

So many questions come up for me! Do pain questionnaires measure what matters to people? Can a 0 – 10 response on an item of the Pain Self Efficacy Questionnaire (Nicholas, 2007) represent how someone draws on, and uses, coping strategies to do what matters? Does a response on the 0 – 10 Pain Disability Index (Tait, Chibnall & Krause, 1990) adequately capture how a person does their daily life? If we help people “do exercise” but they don’t continue with these exercises once they resume their own life – what is the point? Why are family members not included any more? How does this fit with New Zealand’s Te Whare Tapa Whā model of health?

The problem/s?

The health profession that entirely focuses on helping people do what matters in their life (occupational therapists use occupation or daily doing as both therapy and outcome) has had trouble describing our contribution. We don’t, as a profession, fit well into a medical model of health. We focus almost exclusively on the “Function” and “Participation” parts of the ICF – and we focus on daily life contexts. Researching our contribution using RCTs is difficult because we offer unique solutions that help this person and their whanau in their own context, and no-one’s daily life looks the same as another’s. We are about meaning, expressing individuality and self concept through the way we do our lives. This doesn’t lend itself to a clinic-based practice, or a hospital, or a standardised treatment, or treatment algorithms. Our contribution has been eroded over time. Very few pain management programmes incorporate occupational therapy – most are physiotherapy + psychology. This is especially noticeable in NZs ACC community pain management programmes.

Pain management is often based on the assumption that if a person is told what to do, perhaps gets to do it in a clinic with a therapist, this is sufficient. And for some people, especially those who view themselves in the same way as therapists (ie, individual responsibility), and people with the psychological flexibility and internal resources to just do it, they may do quite well. BUT consider the people we know who don’t. People from different cultures, lower socio-economic living, neurodiverse, those with competing values, lack of confidence, lack of personal agency – these are the people who don’t do as well in all of our healthcare, and especially those programmes relying on “self-management”.

Programmes also assume that what is done in a clinic can readily transfer to daily life. Clinics are contained, often purpose-built, usually regulated, and have a therapist handy. People are there for the one purpose. Daily life, on the other hand, is highly variable, holds multiple competing demands, other people question what you’re doing and why, is quite chaotic and messy. And there is no therapist. How does a person decide what to do, when, how, and why?

Remember your challenges with developing one new habit. How you had to stake a claim in your own life to create space for this new activity. How you sometimes forgot. How a change in one part of your life undermined you doing this new thing. How this was only one change. Only one. And what do we ask people with pain to do? And we don’t even bother to find out what is still being done 12 months down the track.

Practical pain management is about helping someone work out how to organise their week so they can add in this new exercise programme that might help, alongside having time and energy to be a good Mum, pick the kids up from school, sort the washing, do the groceries, oh and the car needs a new warrant, and I need a new prescription for my meds.

It’s about working out the best time of day to do some mindfulness – when will it do the most good? when can I fit it in? how do I deal with my partner wanting to get out and start the day while I’m meditating?

It’s about communicating to my boss, my colleagues and my customers that I need to get up and walk around – and maybe say no to some new projects at the moment. Perhaps I need to be more assertive about my own needs. Perhaps I’m worried I’ll lose my job because I need to make these changes….

In the rush to streamline pain management to the bare bones, I wonder if we have forgotten who it is all about. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata – it is people, it is people, it is people. Let’s remember that coping strategies and exercise and all the psychological approaches need to be continued for months, and even years. And this means helping people work out what our suggestions look like in their own life. Let’s not omit the profession that puts people and what their daily life looks like as its reason for being.

Tait, R. C., Chibnall, J. T., & Krause, S. (1990). The pain disability index: psychometric properties. Pain, 40(2), 171-182.

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 Medicine, 22(12), 2884-2895. https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnab189

Lewis, G. N., Bean, D., & Mowat, R. (2019, Sep). How Have Chronic Pain Management Programs Progressed? A Mapping Review. Pain Practice, 19(7), 767-784. https://doi.org/10.1111/papr.12805

Mathias, B., Parry-Jones, B., & Huws, J. C. (2014). Individual experiences of an acceptance-based pain management programme: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Psychology & Health, 29(3), 279-296. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2013.845667

Nicholas, M. K. (2007, Feb). The pain self-efficacy questionnaire: Taking pain into account. European Journal of Pain, 11(2), 153-163. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpain.2005.12.008

Penney, L. S., & Haro, E. (2019). Qualitative evaluation of an interdisciplinary chronic pain intervention: outcomes and barriers and facilitators to ongoing pain management. Journal of Pain Research, 12, 865-878. https://doi.org/10.2147/JPR.S185652

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

Rehab fails: What goes wrong in pain rehabilitation (1)

Well obviously I’m not going to cover everything that goes wrong – and certainly not in one post! But inspired by some conversations I’ve had recently, I thought I’d discuss some of the common #fails we do in rehabilitation. Things that might explain why people with pain are thought to be “unmotivated” or “noncompliant” – because if the rehab doesn’t ‘work’ of course it’s the person with pain who’s at fault, right? So for today, here goes.

Starting at the wrong intensity

One of the main things that happens when someone’s in pain is to reduce overall activity level. Pain has been called “activity intolerance” and it’s common for people to stop doing. So naturally when a clinician is developing an activity or exercise programme, the aim is often to simply increase how much movement a person does in a day. So far, so good. Muscles and cardiovascular systems improve when we use them.

But guess what? There’s a person inside that body! And people have minds. Minds with opinions about everything and in particular, anything to do with doing. There’s often a “should” about how much movement or activity to do. This rule might be based on “pain is a sign of tissue damage” so anything that increases pain clearly “should not be done”. There may equally be a “should” about how much exercise this person used to do, or wants to do, and often mental comments about “what kind of a person does this amount of exercise.”

I’ve heard good clinicians say that their patients “have unrealistic goals” – this is probably because the person’s mind has an opinion about what he or she “should” be able to do!

What can good therapists do about this? Well, firstly to ignore the person who inhabits the body is plain wrong. Secondly, flashy gadgets like coloured tapes or special elastics or foam thingies probably won’t do much for the person’s opinionated mind except to temporarily distract — oooh! shiny!!

Something I might do would be to ask the person what level they think they can begin at – beginning where the person is at, and moving at his or her pace is a solid foundation for developing a relationship where experimenting with movement becomes about the person and his or her relationship with their body. I think one of the aims of movement rehabilitation is to help the person develop trust in their own body and how it moves, so enhancing playfulness and experimentation can be a good start.

I might ask the person “what shows up when we begin doing this set of movements/exercises”? By “showing up” I’m talking about thoughts, images, sensations in the body that pop into a person’s mind (minds are soooo opinionated!). We might need to guide the person to notice quick thoughts or images, to put words to emotions and feelings, and to get in touch with fleeting sensations in the body.

Some of the things I’ve heard people say include: “only weak losers would call this exercise”, “I used to be able to lift 40kg sacks of cement and now all I can move is this pathetic 5kg dumbbell”, “he wants me to do what?! I hate boring exercises”, “but what am I going to feel like tomorrow?”

What do we do with these thoughts?

First: make room for them to be present. Don’t quickly deny them “Oh of course you’re not weak”, “5kg isn’t pathetic”, “exercise is great fun”, “you’ll be fine, you can do this”. Saying these sorts of things dismisses the validity of the person’s fears and won’t win you any friends.

Second: empathic reflection. Indicate that you’ve heard what the person has said, validate that this is their experience, their thoughts. Something like “it’s a long way from what you used to lift, and that’s hard”, “it’s tough beginning to build up again”, “you’re worried that this is going to be unrewarding”, “you’ve had pain flare-ups before, and it’s hard to deal with”.

Third: Ask the person where they’d like to begin, put them in control of the intensity. Then ask them “how do you think that’s going to pan out” – in other words, will their option get them to where they want to be? What’s good about it? What’s not so good about it? from their perspective not yours! The idea is to establish how workable the person’s starting point might be. It might be perfectly fine, even if it’s not your choice!

Fourth: Affirm that the choice is the person’s – and that this is an experiment that will be reviewed at the next session. You might say something like “So you’d like to try doing 5 minutes of walking instead of the treadmill that I suggested, because you think this shouldn’t flare your pain up as much. What’s your choice now that we’ve talked about the good and not so good? We can review it next time.”

Fifth: Review how it went at the next session! Note down the rationale the person had for the level of intensity they chose, and then review how well that intensity worked from this perspective. For example “you wanted to do 5 minutes of walking because it wouldn’t flare you pain up as much, what did you notice? What showed up? How well did it work?” Notice all the open-ended questions, the reminder that the person thought this intensity wouldn’t flare their pain as much, and the focus on workability. Because at the beginning of a movement or exercise programme, what you’re looking for is adherence, sticking to the level of intensity chosen. Habits take time to make, and often adhering to a programme is because the opinionated mind is having a go at the person, interfering with their willingness to stick with it. If we avoid that roadblock, we have at least one point on the board.

Your opinionated mind might now be telling you that “oh they’ll never make progress at that pace”, “they’ll do themselves an injury if they lift that much”, “this is just pandering to their lack of motivation”

Be careful! At this point you could reflect on what’s showing up for you. Are you worried their outcomes will reflect badly on you? Do you only have a few sessions with the person and need them to get somewhere or you’ll have failed? Make room for those uncomfortable feelings. Let them be present and listen to what your opinionated mind is telling you. Maybe remind yourself that outcomes don’t depend on you – they depend on the person sticking to the programme, and a programme that doesn’t start because the person’s mind tells them it’s not worth it is a #rehabfail Remember also that you’re aiming for the person to gain confidence in their body, learn to listen to what happens when they try something out – the repeated progress reviews you do with the person are the actual active ingredients in therapy, they’re the bits that help the person to reflect on what works, and what doesn’t. That’s gold.

ps The technique I’ve described above is – gasp! – a psychological approach, based on ACT and motivational interviewing. You won’t find a specific study examining this approach in journals (at least not in a cursory search like I did!), but it’s an application of well-studied approaches into a movement or exercise context. It’s the same approach I use in contextually-relevant occupational therapy. Reading Bailey et al, 2020, affirms to me that we have a way to go to define and measure adherence, so I feel justified in using these strategies!

Bailey, D. L., Holden, M. A., Foster, N. E., Quicke, J. G., Haywood, K. L., & Bishop, A. (2020, Mar). Defining adherence to therapeutic exercise for musculoskeletal pain: a systematic review. Br J Sports Med, 54(6), 326-331. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-098742

Eynon, M., Foad, J., Downey, J., Bowmer, Y., & Mills, H. (2019). Assessing the psychosocial factors associated with adherence to exercise referral schemes: A systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 29(5), 638-650. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13403

Levi, Y., Gottlieb, U., Shavit, R., & Springer, S. (2021). A matter of choice: Should students self-select exercise for their nonspecific chronic low back pain? A controlled study. Journal of American College Health, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2021.1960845

Making sense of pain

It’s been said many times, so many times I can’t locate the originator of the saying “humans are meaning-making machines” – no more so than when a person experiences pain. Whether it’s a stubbed toe, sprained ankle, thundering headache – or, in my case, weird and ongoing widespread body pain AKA fibromyalgia – we would like to make sense of what’s going on. And mostly we tell simple stories about what we were doing, what happened to the body and that’s that.

In the case of weird or persistent pains the challenge becomes harder. The original story might not fit any more, or because of that story, we limit what we do in case we do damage.

Now philosophers and other commentators have taken up the matter of what this experience really is: sensation or perception? Frankly, I don’t think this matters a jot to the people I see who are trying hard to make sense of what their pain means to them. One person I’ve seen recently said “I feel adrift, like a pingpong ball bobbing on the sea” – life is what isn’t making sense any more. And life, dear readers, is not as simple as sensation or perception.

One of the concepts used to understand what constitutes health is the construct “meaning in life.” Meaning in life is associated with resilience, better health outcomes, and very importantly, recovery from Covid and dealing with the stress of how Covid and other world events have played out over the past few years (Arlsan & Allen, 2021; King & Hicks, 2021; Lin, 2021). But where meaning in life has been extensively studied is….chronic pain.

This makes sense to me! Chronic pain is known to disrupt “normal” life for the person experiencing it. Movements that used to be done without thinking are now etched into memory. Sleep isn’t the respite from world cares it was – now it’s endless hours of aching. Assumptions about how quickly a person should recover from injury are smashed. Chronic, persisting, ongoing pain can disrupt life as we know it.

Meaning in life is thought to comprise three facets: coherence, purpose, and mattering. Coherence is about comprehending or “making sense of the past, present and imagined future aspects of life, being able to integrate their life story into a coherent whole (King & Hicks, 2021).” Purpose is “a central, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning (McKnight & Kashdan, 2009).” Mattering is about how a person believes their life counts – a sort of transcendence beyond self to a bigger world.

All three of these constructs contribute to an overall belief that life makes sense, and that we are effective agents that contribute over and above our lifetime. You can see how this can erode when living with a meaningless pain like neuropathic pain, or ongoing migraines, or low back pain that just doesn’t settle.

Where does that leave us, if we’re clinicians working with someone experiencing weird pain? I think one of the most important parts of our work is to help people achieve a sense of coherence – that despite pain, it’s possible to still be “me” and that while the future may be different from what was previously imagined, it can still fit into a coherent whole. What this means is helping the person to establish what matters in their life, then figuring out ways for the person to resume those things, whether pain is present or not. This might look like helping the person come up with a story about their pain – a narrative that moves from damage to perhaps recognising that we don’t know why they hurt, but that they know of various factors that influence the severity, frequency and interference of their pain (Hadley & Novitch, 2021).

I also think we need to recognise that people living with pain may also find their purpose is challenged – and some of our work is helping people recognise their purpose in life and find ways to keep moving towards what matters to them. This is the part where we recognise values and life direction – perhaps “occupational drive” or the things that people want and need to do.

Finally, throughout our work with people, we need to remember that mattering matters. That the person we’re working with isn’t “the wonky knee” or “the shoulder” or “the bad back.” Being willing to see the person behind the eyes, the talk, and the pained body. This takes time, and most of all – listening with heart and curiosity.

Arslan, G., & Allen, K. A. (2021, Jan 25). Exploring the association between coronavirus stress, meaning in life, psychological flexibility, and subjective well-being. Psychology, Health and Medicine, 27(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2021.1876892

Hadley, G., & Novitch, M. B. (2021, Apr 1). CBT and CFT for Chronic Pain. Current Pain and Headache Reports, 25(5), 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-021-00948-1

King, L. A., & Hicks, J. A. (2021). The science of meaning in life. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 561-584.

Lin, L. (2021, May). Longitudinal associations of meaning in life and psychosocial adjustment to the COVID-19 outbreak in China. British Journal of Health Psychology, 26(2), 525-534. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12492

Making first contact: What to do with all that information! Part 5

People come to see us because they have a problem. So the formulation approach I’m taking today begins from “the problem” and works back and forward. It’s called a “network” model, and is something many of us do without knowing that’s what we’re doing. The network model can also be called a functional analysis where we’re looking at what happens, and what a person does, and the ongoing consequences or loops that occur over time.

Angelina comes to see you because her neck is very sore. She’s not sure why it’s sore, or what happened to start it off, but she thinks it could be after working for a week at a new workstation where she had to look to the right to read documents, and straight ahead to work on the main monitor. It’s been there for over six months, and she’s come to see you now because she has a week of annual leave and some time to spend on herself. She’s played with changing her pillows because her neck is more uncomfortable in the morning, and it gets painful towards the end of the day just before she heads to sleep. She’s having trouble turning her head to reverse down her driveway, and looking up is almost her least favourite thing. Her sleep is OK once she’s got off to sleep, but initially it takes her a while to fall asleep because she can’t get comfortable. Her partner is getting frustrated with her because she doesn’t want to kiss him because that means she has to look up, and she doesn’t sit on the couch with him any more because he likes to rest his arm around her shoulders – and that increases her pain. She’s irritable and finds herself getting snappy at him. Angelina is in her mid-50’s, otherwise well, but has always lived with various aches and pains, most of which she ignores until they go away. She has had a painful shoulder and lateral elbow pain that lasted for over a year, but has gradually settled down – she didn’t do anything special to manage those after having only a small response to a steroid injection into her shoulder.

Angelina’s main concern is to establish whether her neck pain is anything to worry about, or whether it’s just more of the same, like her shoulder and elbow pain. Her other focus is on getting a comfortable position to go off to sleep because she thinks this is adding to her problem.

OK, so we have a lot of information about Angelina, and we can organise this information in many different ways. Given her main concern is her prognosis and then her sleep, we need to make sure the way we organise the information offers a possible explanation – a hypothesis.

Take a look at the network diagram below to see how I’ve sketched the information out – you’ll note that at this point I’m not trying to develop a diagnosis, I’m focusing on the problem as she sees it.

The matrix I’ve used here comes from Hofmann, Hayes & Lorscheid (2021) Learning Process-based Therapy, published by Context Press, New Harbinger.

What I’ve done is summarised the processes that I think might be relevant to Angelina’s presentation, and drawn the relationships between various aspects that she’s described. You might organise this information differently – and I’d usually do this in collaboration with the person.

If you look closely at the networks, you’ll see several loops that likely will continue if something doesn’t change. One to spot is this set below:

You can see that she’s worrying about her sleep, doesn’t get comfortable as she goes off to sleep, feels fed up, has changed her pillow (in line with her self-concept of someone who is a practical person), and the whole network will likely remain winding itself up unless “something” comes to disrupt this pattern.

This set of relationships raises some factors we need to consider when we’re thinking of interventions. As someone who sees herself as a practical person who doesn’t seek healthcare often, and has had previous bouts of pain that settled without specific treatment (though she sought it for her shoulder), we could interpret this as meaning she doesn’t panic about her situation too much – but we could also wonder if, because she’s seeking help now, she’s seeing her problem as different from previous pain problems and maybe this one is worrying her more than she’s ready to acknowledge. Just to the right of the loop I’ve shown above, you’ll see a box where she says “I’ll deal with it if it doesn’t get in the way of my family and relationship”. This is important – it’s an expression of how she sees herself, an important value, and her motivation for seeking help is also framed in terms of maintaining her loving relationship. For this reason, I’d be looking for interventions that either won’t intrude on her family life and routines, or I’ll be looking for ways to frame whatever treatment suggestions I make in terms of how this will support her relationship.

By drawing a network diagram showing potential processes that might be influencing Angelina’s presentation, I’m answering my question “why is she presenting in this way at this time, and what might be maintaining her predicament” – she really wants a prognosis so she can establish a strategy to maintain her relationship with her family, keeps her “practical person” view of herself alive, and in a way that she can still fulfill her desire (and others’ expectations) to be fully productive at work.

I could analyse (or organise) Angelina’s information in lots of different ways. This is just one – and in some ways, the particular model I use to assemble her information is less important than ensuring Angelina is an equal partner in sketching out these relationships. I could have drawn the Tim Sharpe CBT model or used an ACT-based model and looked for patterns of psychological flexibility. I could have used Vlaeyen’s fear-avoidance model – and I’m sure there are plenty of others that might have been useful.
Irrespective of the model, what needs to be evident is using the information the person offers us, modifying the way we approach therapy as a result, and collaborating with the person to decide treatment priorities. This means we as clinicians need to be nimble, responsive, adaptive, and stop using treatment protocols! Any approach that suggests offering the same approach irrespective of the unique things influencing a person’s presentation is doomed to do a half-arsed job. These protocols might work for some, but they won’t work for all, and they may fail to address the real reason the person came to see us in the first place.

When therapists get hurt

“Physician, heal thyself” – usually used to suggest that the person should fix their own problems before trying to fix someone else. And when a therapist gets hurt all the armchair critics (social media proclamists) go off pointing the finger and telling that person what to do – even when the therapist is doing exactly what evidence suggests is the right thing to do.

Adam Meakins has hurt his back while lifting weights in the gym – he’s documenting his progress on social media, which I think is both a very brave thing to do and also something I’d love to see more of. If you want to follow his progress, head to The Sports Physio on Facebook where he’s posted footage of the onset, and now Days 1 and 2.

Why do I think it’s brave? Well because Adam’s outspoken and highly visible on social media. That means anything and everything he does about his LBP is likely to be scrutinised in detail. All manner of opinions have already been put forth. Diagnoses made (yeah, I know – over the interwebs…), and so many treatment options offered!

Adam’s predicament gets much more attention than Mrs Jones down the road who hurt her back the same day. Yet Adam knows what to do, is doing it, and holding strong to what research suggests is best.

Mrs Jones, on the other hand, is likely subject to some of the opinions that Adam’s getting (go on, take a look, especially on Instagram and Twitter) but without the background and experience Adam has to draw on. No wonder Mrs Jones feels confused.

Adam is brave because, as he pointed out today, having LBP means your mind leaps to unhelpful conclusions, often “thinks the worst” and in the dark of the night, it’s probable that doubts about whether he’s doing the right thing creep in. And if Adam’s recovery is slower than usual, I can hear the chorus of bystanders roar for his blood “You didn’t do what I said you should do”

Because isn’t it peculiar, and common, that when recovery doesn’t follow the standard trajectory, it’s the person’s fault…

Think of Mrs Jones – if her recovery goes the way so many people’s recovery goes and burbles along with flare-ups and periods where it settles, then she’s likely to carry on seeing at least one clinician, probably more. She’ll likely get a whole range of different ways to manage her low back pain – but usually starting with one approach and getting more of it until the clinician decides to change tack, and then onto another one until that clinician decides it’s not working and changes tack….And along the way she’ll acquire labels like “catastrophiser” or “avoidant” or “noncompliant”.

I also said that I’d love more clinicians to post about their recovery. I’ve seen a few, but couldn’t we do more? Why? Because showing how clinicians also “think the worst”, worry, have trouble sleeping, want to keep going but find it tough – despite our knowledge of pain, and all our experience working with people who have pain – is good for us as clinicians.

Because if you’ve never had a bout of back pain it’s relatively easy to think that the way a person reacts to their pain is abnormal. The label “catastrophising” gets bandied about, along with all the other psychosocial factors that can often get used and abused in a way that lays the fault for the person’s predicament on them.

But back pain is really common. Most of us will have a bout at some point in our life – maybe more severe than Adam’s, maybe less severe, maybe associated with heavy lifting as Adam’s was, maybe just bending to pick up a pair of socks. Some of us will be really fit like Adam, others of us will be less fit.

Back pain isn’t very choosy and this is why we haven’t yet found a way to prevent it from ever happening, we can only work with the person to prevent it hanging around and getting in the way of life.

Being honest enough to show that clinicians are human too helps other clinicians rethink the “them and us” divide that is common between people seeking help, and those who would offer help. Because how often do we hear that Mrs Jones was unfit, probably lazy, had a bad lifestyle, ate the wrong foods, did no exercise, and it was probable that she’d develop a back pain. Yet Adam is pretty fit, lives a healthy lifestyle, is certainly not lazy, and like Mrs Jones does not deserve a low back pain.

I hope that Adam doesn’t get the advice I’ve heard given to so many people: get fit, change your lifestyle, get back to work, do more. Mrs Jones might be working two physically demanding jobs (cleaning, and waiting tables). She might walk 20 minutes to get to the bus-stop, and is on her feet all the time she’s at work. She might leave home at 6.00am, get back at 5.00pm to prepare a meal for the rest of her household, then go out again for another three or four hours to her second job, finally arriving home to sleep at 9.00pm. And some youngster suggests she needs to “prioritise herself” and “do exercise”! Who else is going to do what Mrs Jones does for her family?

Finally, I really hope that people offer Mrs Jones a lot more of an empathic response than Adam has had. Anyone experiencing pain needs support – and don’t need a whole bunch of well-intentioned advice from people who don’t know them personally. And some of the comments offered to Adam are not well-intentioned. What does that kind of vicious behaviour show to the general public?

Below – just a small selection of the longitudinal studies exploring the trajectories of back pain in the population. Worth looking at if you think you’ve got The Answer to What To Do – because so far it’s not working.

Canizares, M., Rampersaud, Y. R., & Badley, E. M. (2019, Dec). Course of Back Pain in the Canadian Population: Trajectories, Predictors, and Outcomes. Arthritis care & research, 71(12), 1660-1670. https://doi.org/10.1002/acr.23811

Chen, Y., Campbell, P., Strauss, V. Y., Foster, N. E., Jordan, K. P., & Dunn, K. M. (2018, Feb). Trajectories and predictors of the long-term course of low back pain: cohort study with 5-year follow-up. Pain, 159(2), 252-260. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001097

Gatchel, R. J., Bevers, K., Licciardone, J. C., Su, J., Du, Y., & Brotto, M. (2018, May 17). Transitioning from Acute to Chronic Pain: An Examination of Different Trajectories of Low-Back Pain. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 6(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare6020048

Kongsted, A., Kent, P., Axen, I., Downie, A. S., & Dunn, K. M. (2016, May 21). What have we learned from ten years of trajectory research in low back pain? BMC Musculoskelet Disord, 17, 220. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-016-1071-2

Pico-Espinosa, O. J., Cote, P., Hogg-Johnson, S., Jensen, I., Axen, I., Holm, L. W., & Skillgate, E. (2019). Trajectories of Pain Intensity Over 1 Year in Adults With Disabling Subacute or Chronic Neck Pain [Journal: Article]. Clinical Journal of Pain, 35(8), 678-685.

…the “so what” question and why it matters to take a break from work

At the conclusion of each of the courses I teach at University of Otago, I ask students the “so what” question. So what that we learned about neurobiology? So what that we discussed social constructs and how they shape pain behaviour? So what that we learn that thoughts and beliefs influence our pain experience? What does it all mean when we’re sitting with a person experiencing pain?

This last week I’ve been on a brief trip to the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand Aotearoa. It is a wild and isolated part of our country. So wild that in parts the annual rainfall is over 6,000mm (see the map below!), and the wind blows so that the trees grow almost horizontally. For two days there was no power (and thus no internet, no cellphone cover!) and the gravel road to our campsite was closed until 7.00pm while the power lines were being replaced… I won’t talk about the sandflies and mosquitoes – the size of helicopters!! Well perhaps I exaggerate…

Taking a break from talking pain brings me to my “so what” question. Why do I spend my time trying to help people, especially clinicians, learn about pain? Why am I so focused on bringing a narrative that says “we can’t reduce or remove all pain” and at the same time “it’s possible to live well with pain”? What is my “so what”?

Stepping back from the crabby discourse I see so often on social media – like whether hands on or hands off is preferable, whether pain is sensation or perception, whether exercise should be this or that – I think my purpose is to remind everyone, and especially clinicians, that when we’re working with someone who has weird pain that hangs around our job is to find out what this person’s main concern is. And to remember that irrespective of how much we help someone change their pain, ultimately, they will go on to live their own life. Not ours. Theirs.

It struck me from time to time as I swatted sandflies (helicopter sized ones, of course), that many of us work within inflexible processes and systems that demand we identify goals after only just meeting a person. It struck me that the people who develop policy and who get involved in establishing processes are not engaged in public discourse, at least, not in social media where so many of “us” hang out. I pondered how it is that the collective weight of allied health – numbering far more than our medical colleagues – has not yet shifted our conversations about best ways to help people with pain away from symptom reduction, despite our lack of success when it comes to pain. How we continually fixate on “if the pain goes, the person will go back to normal”. How we tout exercise as The Cure despite such small effect sizes on pain intensity, quality and disability. And for exercise, we could substitute needles, manual therapy, taping, medications…. How we want simple recipes, algorithms that sort people into “responders” and “non-responders” while failing to acknowledge that so far we haven’t achieved this and besides these approaches assume that everyone wants the same outcome.

Taking a break from work offers me a chance to refresh my perspective. My pain, it must be said, doesn’t take a break. And that, folks, is the reality for so many people in our communities. Because persistent pain persists. When we’re at work, and when we’re on holiday. When we’re trying to sleep, and when we’re busy with family. And we all come from what was our normal lifestyle. And some clinicians think that if only we would – understand pain neurobiology, pace, exercise, eat right, use mindfulness, check our thinking and get rid of maladaptive beliefs… then life would be fine. But would that life be what I want? Would it look like my life? Would I be able to be ME inside that regimen of all those things?

Clinicians, we can often omit to ask “what’s your main concern about your pain?” And we often forget to find out what that person values in their life. Our goal setting turns out to be OUR goals, often based on pain reduction – or focused on achieving X, Y, Z. Doing this means attention is paid to the end point – but then the process of getting there is left out. And life is a process (OK a journey) not a goal (OK a destination).

As I approach my teaching this year, and my interactions online, I want to emphasise respecting the autonomy and strengths people living with pain bring with them. That a person’s life and choices are theirs to make – and if we try to change people, we’ll fail. We can invite people to experiment with, play with, test, try out different ways of being, but unless we understand a person’s values and work with them, we’re probably not going get more than superficial compliance. Let’s be respectful and honour the complexity of each individual we encounter – and let’s not treat them as part of an algorithm.

What to do about acute low back pain

I should add another line to that heading: in one easy step! And I’d be inundated with hits and if I could cash in on them I’d be rich! And wrong.

If there was a simple recipe for success, I’d expect that by now we’d have it. The very fact that SO MANY options for managing a bout of low back pain exist is a good reason for skepticism should you ever get tempted to take a headline like mine as a cause for celebration. However I do want to talk about acute low back pain because I think clinicians are often probably doing it wrong.

First of all, low back pain doesn’t include pain that also goes down the leg. Let’s get the definitions clear before we talk! In 2008 a Delphi study by Dione, Dunn, Croft, Nachemson, Buchbinder, Walker and colleagues (2008) developed two definitions: a minimal definition, and an optimal definition. These definitions were developed for epidemiological studies and the minimal definition is very simple – “In the past 4 weeks, have you had pain in your low back?” and “If yes, was this pain bad enough to limit your usual activities of change your daily routine for more than one day?”

from Dionne, Dunn, Croft, Nachemson, Buchbinder, Walker et al, (2008)

Now when it comes to defining a first bout of acute low back pain, Ardakani, Leboeuf-Yde & Walker (2019) raise some very interesting points: researchers investigating acute low back pain don’t clearly distinguish between the factors associated with the disease of low back pain (as they put it, the onset of the very first episode) from its recurring episodes – as they put it, “the continued manifestations of the “disease”.” In fact, in their systematic review for identifying risk factors from “triggers” (their term for subsequent episodes), they could find only one study dealing with the true incidence of first time low back pain – and this was low back pain caused by sports injury. All the remaining studies either explored new episodes, or recurring episodes. The major problem with these studies? They didn’t define how long a person should have had no low back pain at baseline. And given many of us develop back pain in adolescence (see Franz, Wedderkopp, Jespersen, Texen and Leboeuf-Yde, 2014, or Jones & MacFarlane, 2005) for example) it’s probable that studies investigating those over 18 years old will include a lot of people who have had that first bout already.

The trajectories for those of us who do develop low back pain are also reasonably murky because of the challenges around definitions, and there are several studies with slightly different results as you’d expect. Essentially, though, most researchers find that there are three or four patterns that emerge from longitudinal studies: lucky ones who have one bout and no or low levels of pain thereafter; those who have persisting mild pain, those who have fluctuating bouts over time, and those who develop persistent and severe pain. Chen and colleagues (2018) found that “lower social class”, higher pain intensity at the beginning, the person’s perceptions of more challenging consequences and longer pain duration, and greater “passive” behavioural coping were most significantly associated with the more severe trajectory over five years.

So, what does this mean for clinicians – and how well are we doing?

Acute low back pain can really frightening for people, especially if the pain is severe. As clinicians generally choose this work because we care about people, we get hooked into wanting to reduce pain and help. There’s nothing wrong about this – unless it means we also get hooked into trying to offer something we cannot. We’re inclined to believe that people seek help for their back pain because of the pain – but as Mannion, Wieser & Elfering (2013) found from a study of over 1,000 people with back pain at the time of the survey, 72% hadn’t sought care over the previous four weeks; 28% had sought care – and most from more than one provider. Women were more likely to seek care, those who had experienced more previous bouts, those who had trouble with activities of daily living and more trouble with work activities. While pain intensity did feature, it wasn’t as much of a predictor as many clinicians would expect. Indeed, an earlier meta-analysis by Ferreira and colleagues (2010) found that disability was a stronger predictor for seeking treatment than pain intensity.

So what do clinicians focus on? I suspect, though I aim to be proven incorrect, that almost every clinician will ask “what is your pain intensity on a scale from 0 – 10?” Frankly, this question is one that irritates me no end because how on earth do you rate pain? Seriously. Yes, there are a lot of clinicians who then ask about activities a person wants to be able to do (yay!) though when we look at the treatments offered, I wonder how many follow through with practical goal-setting for daily activities like getting shoes and socks on, carrying the groceries, sitting while driving the car or at work… And treatments? the arguments on social media between clinicians would be fun to watch if only they weren’t accompanied by such vehemence!

What I don’t see are conversations about how we help people recognise that they’re likely to follow one of those four trajectories, and what we do to help people self manage a life alongside low back pain.

I don’t see much attention paid to helping people sleep well.

Lots of conversations about pain neurobiology – in an attempt to use this explanation to bring someone on board to engage in treatments.

I don’t see a lot of discussion about how to ask about the person’s main concern – perhaps it’s nothing to do with pain, but more about “my niece is coming to visit and I’m not sure I can cope with entertaining her and managing my back pain”, or “we’re coming up to the busy time at work and I can’t not go in, but when I get home I’m trashed, how can I manage that?”, or “Monday’s are our busiest day, and I have to keep going because the team needs me, what do I do?”

I wonder whether clinicians could be persuaded to get out of the way and stop confusing people with recipes or algorithms or “special exercises” that “must be done this way” – I wonder if we could offer some very simple steps: specific answers to the person’s main concerns (best form of reassurance there is!); goal setting around the things the person needs and wants to do over the first six to eight weeks; sleep strategies including some mindfulness because that’s likely to help long-term; and lots of encouragement as the person returns to activity. Developing a relationship with the person doesn’t need lots of prescriptive steps or cookie cutter programmes, it does mean listening, showing trust in the person’s own capabilities, and willingness to let go of a few sticky thoughts we’ve acquired during our training. Maybe 2021 could be the year clinicians get back to basics and begin to support resilience in the people we see – firstly by showing them that we trust they have the capabilities.

Ardakani, E. M., Leboeuf-Yde, C., & Walker, B. F. (2019). Can We Trust the Literature on Risk Factors and Triggers for Low Back Pain? A Systematic Review of a Sample of Contemporary Literature. Pain Res Manag, 2019, 6959631. doi: 10.1155/2019/6959631

Dionne, C. E., Dunn, K. M., Croft, P. R., Nachemson, A. L., Buchbinder, R., Walker, B. F., . . . Von Korff, M. (2008). A consensus approach toward the standardization of back pain definitions for use in prevalence studies. Spine, 33(1), 95-103.

Franz, C., Wedderkopp, N., Jespersen, E., Rexen, C. T., & Leboeuf-Yde, C. (2014). Back pain in children surveyed with weekly text messages-a 2.5 year prospective school cohort study. Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, 22(1), 35.

Jones, G. T., & MacFarlane, G. J. (2005). Epidemiology of low back pain in children and adolescents. Archives of disease in childhood, 90(3), 312-316.

Mannion, A. F., Wieser, S., & Elfering, A. (2013). Association between beliefs and care-seeking behavior for low back pain. Spine, 38(12), 1016–1025