Did it help? Questions and debate in pain measurement

Pain intensity, quality and location are three important domains to consider in pain measurement. And in our kete*of assessment tools we have many to choose from! A current debate (ongoing debate?) in the august pages of Pain (International Association for the Study of Pain) journal shows that the issue of how best to collate the various facets of our experience of pain is far from decided – or even understood.

The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) is one of the most venerable old measurement instruments in the pain world.  It is designed to evaluate the qualities of pain – the “what does it feel like” of sensory-discriminative components, evaluative components, and cognitive-affective components. There are 20 categories in the tool, and these examine (or attempt to measure) mechanical qualities, thermal qualities, location and time.  Gracely (2016), in an editorial piece, compares the McGill to a set of paint colour samples – if pain intensity equals shades of grey, then the other qualities are other coloures – blue, green, red – in shades or tints, so we can mix and match to arrive at a unique understanding of what this pain is “like” for another person.

To begin to understand the MPQ, it’s important to understand how it was developed. Melzack recognised that pain intensity measurement, using a dolimeter (yes, there is such a thing – this is not an endorsement, just to prove it’s there), doesn’t equate with the qualities of pain experienced, nor of the impact of previous experiences. At the time, Melzack and Wall were working on their gate control theory of pain, so it’s useful to remember that this had not yet been published, and specificity theory was holding sway – specificity theory arguing that pain is a “specific modality of cutaneous sensation”, while pattern theory held that the experience reflects the nervous systems ability to “select and abstract” relevant information (Main, 2016).  So Melzack adopted a previous list of 44 words, carried out a literature review, and recorded the words used by his patients. Guided by his own three dimensional model of pain, he generate three groups of descriptors to begin to establish a sort of “quality intensity scale”. These were then whittled down to 78 words that have been used since, and by used I mean probably the most used instrument ever! Except for the VAS.

There are arguments against the MPQ – I’m one who doesn’t find it helpful, and this undoubtedly reflects that I work in a New Zealand context, with people who may not have the language repertoire of those that Melzack drew on. The people I work with don’t understand many of the words (‘Lancinating‘ anyone?), and like many pain measures, the importance or relevance of terms used in this measure are based on expert opinion rather than the views of those who are experiencing pain themselves. This means the measure may not actually tap into aspects of the experience of pain that means a lot to people living with it. Main (2016) also points out that interpreting the MPQ is problematic, and perhaps there are alternative measures that might be more useful in clinical practice. Some of the criticisms include the difficulty we have in separating the “perceptual” aspects of pain from the way pain functions in our lives, and the way we communicate it, and the MPQ doesn’t have any way to factor in the social context, or the motivational aspects of both pain and its communication.

In a letter to the editor of Pain, Okkels, Kyle and Bech (2016) propose that there should be three factors in the measurement – symptom burden (they suggest pain intensity), side effects (or medication – but what if there’s no medication available?), and improved quality of life (WHO-5). But as Sullivan and Ballantyne (2016) point out in their reply – surely the point of treatment is to improve patient’s lives – “we want to know if it is possible for the patient’s life to move forward again. However it is also important that we do not usurp patients’ authority to judge whether their life has improved” (p. 1574). What weighting we give to, for example, pain reduction vs improved quality of life? I concur. Even the MPQ with all its history doesn’t quite reflect the “what it means to me to experience this pain”.

Did it help? Answering this critical question is not easy. Pain measurement is needed for furthering our understanding of pain, to ensure clinical management is effective, and to allow us to compare treatment with treatment. But at this point, I don’t know whether our measures reflect relevant aspects of this common human experience.  Is it time to revisit some of these older measures of pain and disability, and critically appraise them in terms of how well they work from the perspectives of the people living with pain? Does this mean taking some time away from high tech measurement and back to conversations with people?

 

(*pronounced “keh-teh” – Maori word for kitbag, and often used to represent knowledge)

Gracely, R. H. (2016). Pain language and evaluation. Pain, 157(7), 1369-1372.

Main, C. J. (2016). Pain assessment in context: A state of the science review of the mcgill pain questionnaire 40 years on. Pain, 157(7), 1387-1399.

Okkels, N., Kyle, P. R., & Bech, P. (2016). Measuring chronic pain. Pain, 157(7), 1574.

Sullivan, M. D., & Ballantyne, J. (2016). Reply. Pain, 157(7), 1574-1575.

 

Pain measurement: Measuring an experience is like holding water

Measurement in pain is complicated. Firstly it’s an experience, so inherently subjective – how do we measure “taste”, for example? Or “joy”? Secondly, there’s so much riding on its measurement: how much pain relief a person gets, whether a treatment has been successful, whether a person is thought sick enough to be excused from working, whether a person even gets treatment at all…

And even more than these, given it’s so important and we have to use surrogate ways to measure the unmeasurable, we have the language of assessment. In physiotherapy practice, what the person says is called “subjective” while the measurements the clinician takes are called “objective” – as if, by them being conducted by a clinician and by using instruments, they’re not biased or “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts”. Subjective, in this instance, is defined by Merriam Webster as “ relating to the way a person experiences things in his or her own mind. : based on feelings or opinions rather than facts.”  Of course, we know that variability exists between clinicians even when carrying out seemingly “objective” tests of, for example, range of movement, muscle strength, or interpreting radiological images or even conducting a Timed Up and Go test (take a look here at a very good review of this common functional test – click)

In the latest issue of Pain, Professor Stephen Morley reflects on bias and reliability in pain ratings, reminding us that “measurement of psychological variables is an interaction between the individual, the test material, and the context in which the measure is taken” (Morley, 2016). While there are many ways formal testing can be standardised to reduce the amount of bias, it doesn’t completely remove the variability inherent in a measurement situation.

Morley was providing commentary on a study published in the same journal, a study in which participants were given training and prompts each day when they were asked to rate their pain. Actually, three groups were compared: a group without training, a group with training but no prompts, and a group with training and daily prompts (Smith, Amtmann, Askew, Gewandter et al, 2016). The hypothesis was that people given training would provide more consistent pain ratings than those who weren’t. But no, in another twist to the pain story, the results showed that during the first post-training week, participants with training were less reliable than those who simply gave a rating as usual.

Morley considers two possible explanations for this – the first relates to the whole notion of reliability. Reliability is about identifying how much of the variability is due to the test being a bit inaccurate, vs how much variability is due to the variability of the actual thing being measured, assuming that errors or variability are only random. So perhaps one problem is that pain intensity does vary a great deal from day-to-day.  The second reason is related to the way people make judgements about their own pain intensity. Smith and colleagues identify two main biases (bias = systematic errors) – scale anchoring effects (that by giving people a set word or concept to “anchor” their ratings, the tendency to wander off and report pain based only on emotion or setting or memory might be reduced), and that daily variations in context might also influence pain. Smith and colleagues believed that by providing anchors between least and “worst imaginable pain”, they’d be able to guide people to reflect on these same imagined experiences each day, that these imagined experiences would be pretty stable, and that people could compare what they were actually experiencing at the time with these imagined pain intensities.

But, and it’s a big but, how do people scale and remember pain? And as Morley asks, “What aspect of the imagined pain is reimagined and used as an anchor at the point of rating?” He points out that re-experiencing the somatosensory-intensity aspect of pain is rare (though people can remember the context in which they experienced that pain, and they can give a summative evaluative assessment such as “oh it was horrible”). Smith and colleagues’ study attempted to control for contextual effects by asking people to reflect only on intensity and duration, and only on pain intensity rather than other associated experiences such as fatigue or stress. This, it must be said, is pretty darned impossible, and Morley again points out that “peak-end” phenomenon (which means that our estimate of pain intensity depends a great deal on how long we think an experience might go on, disparities between what we expect and what we actually feel, and differences between each of us) will bias self-report.

Smith et al (2016) carefully review and discuss their findings, and I strongly encourage readers to read the entire paper themselves. This is important stuff – even though this was an approach designed to help improve pain intensity measurement within treatment trials, what it tells us is that our understanding of pain intensity measurement needs more work, and that some of our assumptions about measuring our pain experience using a simple numeric rating scale might be challenged. The study used people living with chronic pain, and their experiences may be different from those with acute pain (eg post-surgical pain). The training did appear to help people correctly rank their pain in terms of least pain, average pain, and worst pain daily ratings.

What can we learn from this study? I think it’s a good reminder to us to think about our assumptions about ANY kind of measurement in pain. Including what we observe, what we do when carrying out pain assessments, and the influences we don’t yet know about on pain intensity ratings.

Morley, S. (2016). Bias and reliability in pain ratings. Pain, 157(5), 993-994.

Smith, S. M., Amtmann, D., Askew, R. L., Gewandter, J. S., Hunsinger, M., Jensen, M. P., . . . Dworkin, R. H. (2016). Pain intensity rating training: Results from an exploratory study of the acttion protecct system. Pain, 157(5), 1056-1064.

Using a new avoidance measure in the clinic

A new measure of avoidance is a pretty good thing. Until now we’ve used self report questionnaires (such as the Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia, or the Pain Catastrophising Scale), often combined with a measure of disability like the Oswestry Disability Index to determine who might be unnecessarily restricting daily activities out of fear of pain or injury. These are useful instruments, but don’t give us the full picture because many people with back pain don’t see that their avoidance might be because of pain-related fear – after all, it makes sense to not do movements that hurt or could be harmful, right?

Behavioural avoidance tests (BAT) are measures developed to assess observable avoidance behaviour. They’ve been used for many years for things like OCD and phobias for both assessments and treatments. The person is asked to approach a feared stimulus in a standardised environment to generate fear-related behaviours without the biases that arise from self-report (like not wanting to look bad, or being unaware of a fear).

This new measure involves asking a person to carry out 10 repetitions of certain movements designed to provoke avoidance. The link for the full instructions for this test is this: click

Essentially, the person is shown how to carry out the movements (demonstrated by the examiner/clinician), then they are asked to do the same set of movements ten times.  Each set of movements is rated 0 = performs exactly as the clinician does; 1 = movement is performed but the client uses safety behaviours such as holding the breath, taking medication before doing the task, asking for help, or motor behaviours such as keeping the back straight (rotation and bending movements are involved); 2 = the person avoids doing the movement, and if the person performs fewer than 10 repetitions, those that are not completed are also coded 2. The range of scores obtainable are 0 – 60.

How and when would you use this test?

It’s tempting to rush in and use a new test simply because it’s new and groovy, so some caution is required.

My questions are: (1) does it help me (or the person) obtain a deeper understanding of the contributing factors to their problem? (2) Is it more reliable or more valid than other tests? (3) Is it able to be used in a clinical setting? (4) Does it help me generate better hypotheses as to what’s going on for this person? (5) I also ask about cost, time required, scoring and whether special training is required.

This test is very useful for answering question (1). It provides me with a greater opportunity to review the thoughts, beliefs and behaviours of a person in the moment. This means I can very quickly identify even the subtle safety behaviours, and obtain the “what’s going through your mind” of the person. If I record the movements, I can show the person what’s going on. NB This is NOT intended to be a test of biomechanical efficiency, or to identify “flaws” in movement patterns. This is NOT a physical performance test, it’s a test of behaviour and belief. Don’t even try to use it as a traditional performance test, or I will find you and I will kill (oops, wrong story).

It is more valid than other tests – the authors indicate it is more strongly associated with measures of disability than measures of pain-related fear and avoidance behaviour. This is expected, because it’s possible to be afraid of something but actually do it (public speaking anyone?), and measures of disability don’t consider the cause of that disability (it could be wonky knees, or a dicky ticker!).

It’s easy to do in a clinical setting – A crate of water bottles (~8 kg) and a table (heights ~68 cm) are needed to conduct the BAT-Back. The crate weighed  7.8 kg including six one-litre plastic bottles. One could argue that people might find doing this test in a clinic is less threatening than doing it in real life, and this is quite correct. The setting is contained, there’s a health professional around, the load won’t break and there’s no time pressure, so it’s not ecologically valid for many real world settings – but it’s better than doing a ROM assessment, or just asking the person!

Does it help me generate better hypotheses? Yes it certainly does, provided I take my biomechanical hat off and don’t mix up a BAT with a physical performance assessment. We know that biomechanics are important in some instances, but when it comes to low back pain it doesn’t seem to have as much influence as a person’s thoughts and beliefs – and more importantly, their tendency to just not do certain movements. This test allows me to go through the thoughts that flash through a person’s mind as they do the movement, thus helping me and the person more accurately identify what it is about the movement that’s bothering them. Then we can go on to test their belief and establish whether the consequences are, in fact, worse than the effects of avoidance.

Finally, is it cost-effective? Overall I’d say yes – with a caveat. You need to be very good at spotting safety behaviours, and you need to have a very clear understanding about the purpose of this test, and you may need training to develop these skills and the underlying conceptual understanding of behavioural analysis.

When would I use it? Any time I suspect a person is profoundly disabled as a result of their back pain, but does not present with depression, other tissue changes (limb fracture, wonky knees or ankles etc) that would influence the level of disability. If a person has elevated scores on the TSK or PCS. If they have elevated scores on measures of disability. If I think they may respond to a behavioural approach.

Oh, the authors say very clearly that one of the confounds of this test is when a person has biological factors such as bony changes to the vertebrae, shortened muscles, arthritic knees and so on. So you can put your biomechanical hat on – but remember the overall purpose of this test is to understand what’s going on in the person’s mind when they perform these movements.

Scoring and normative data has not yet been compiled. Perhaps that’s a Masters research project for someone?

Holzapfel, S., Riecke, J., Rief, W., Schneider, J., & Glombiewski, J. A. (in press). Development and validation of the behavioral avoidance test – back pain (bat-back) for patients with chronic low back pain. Clinical Journal of Pain.

 

 

Fibro fog or losing your marbles: the effect of chronic pain on everyday executive functioning

There are days when I think I’m losing the plot! When my memory fades, I get distracted by random thin—-ooh! is that a cat?!

We all have brain fades, but people with chronic pain have more of them. Sometimes it’s due to the side effects of medication, and often it’s due to poor sleep, or low mood – but whatever the cause, the problem is that people living with chronic pain can find it very hard to direct their attention to what’s important, or to shift their attention away from one thing and on to another.

In an interesting study I found today, Baker, Gibson, Georgiou-Karistianis, Roth and Giummarra (in press), used a brief screening measure to compare the executive functioning of a group of people with chronic pain with a matched set of painfree individuals. The test is called Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Adult version (BRIEF-A) which measures Inhibition, Shift, Emotional Control, Initiate, Self-Monitor, Working Memory, Plan/Organize, Task Monitor, and Organization of Materials.

Executive functioning refers to “higher” cortical functions such as being able to attend to complex situations, make the right decision and evaluate the outcome. It’s the function that helps us deal with everyday situations that have novel features – like when we’re driving, doing the grocery shopping, or cooking a meal. It’s long been known that people living with chronic pain experience difficulty with these things, not just because of fatigue and pain when moving, but because of limitations on how well they can concentrate. Along with the impact on emotions (feeling irritable, anxious and down), and physical functioning (having poorer exercise tolerance, limitations in how often or far loads can be lifted, etc), it seems that cognitive impairment is part of the picture when you’re living with chronic pain.

Some of the mechanisms thought to be involved in this are the “interruptive” nature of pain – the experience demands attention, directing attention away from other things and towards pain and pain-related objects and situations; in addition, there are now known to be structural changes in the brain – not only sensory processing and motor function, but also the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is needed for complex cognitive tasks.

One of the challenges in testing executive functions in people living with chronic pain is that usually they perform quite well on standard pen and paper tasks – when the room is quiet, there are no distractions, they’re rested and generally feeling calm. But put them in a busy supermarket or shopping mall, or driving a car in a busy highway, and performance is not such an easy thing!

So, for this study the researchers used the self-report questionnaire to ask people about their everyday experiences which does have some limitations – but the measure has been shown to compare favourably with real world experiences of people with other conditions such as substance abuse, prefrontal cortex lesions, and ADHD.

What did they find?

Well, quite simply they found that 50% of patients showed clinical elevation on Shift, Emotional Control, Initiate, and Working Memory subscales with emotional control and working memory the most elevated subscales.

What does this mean?

It means that chronic pain doesn’t only affect how uncomfortable it might be to move, or sit or stand; and it doesn’t only affect mood and anxiety; and it’s not just a matter of being fogged with medications (although these contribute), instead it shows that there are clear effects of experiencing chronic pain on some important aspects of planning and carrying out complex tasks in the real world.

The real impact of these deficits is not just on daily tasks, but also on how readily people with chronic pain can adopt and integrate all those coping strategies we talk about in pain management programmes. Things like deciding to use activity pacing means – decision making on the fly, regulating emotions to deal with frustration of not getting jobs done, delaying the flush of pleasure of getting things completed, having to break a task down into many parts to work out which is the most important, holding part of a task in working memory to be able to decide what to do next. All of these are complex cortical activities that living with chronic pain can affect.

It means clinicians need to help people learn new techniques slowly, supporting their generalising into daily life by ensuring they’re not overwhelming, and perhaps using tools like smartphone alarms or other environmental cues to help people know when to try using a different technique. It also means clinicians need to think about assessing how well a person can carry out these complex functions at the beginning of therapy – it might change the way coping strategies are learned, and it might mean considering changes to medication (avoiding opiates, but not only these because many pain medications affect cognition), and thinking about managing mood promptly.

The BRIEF-A is not the last word in neuropsych testing, but it may be a helpful screening measure to indicate areas for further testing and for helping people live more fully despite chronic pain.

 

Baker, K., Gibson, S., Georgiou-Karistianis, N., Roth, R., & Giummarra, M. (2015). Everyday Executive Functioning in Chronic Pain The Clinical Journal of Pain DOI: 10.1097/AJP.0000000000000313

Faking pain – Is there a test for it?

One of the weird things about pain is that no-one knows if you’re faking. To date there hasn’t been a test that can tell whether you’re really in pain, or just faking it. Well, that’s about to change according to researchers in Israel and Canada.

While there have been a whole range of approaches to checking out faking such as facial expression, responses to questionnaires, physical testing and physical examinations, none of these have been without serious criticism. And the implications are pretty important to the person being tested – if you’re sincere, but someone says you’re not, how on earth do you prove that you’re really in pain? For clinicians, the problem is very troubling because allegations of faking can strain a working relationship with a person, and hardly lead to a sense of trust. Yet insurance companies routinely ask clinicians to make determinations about fraudulent access to insurance money – and worst of all, clinicians often feel they have little choice other than to participate.

In this study by Kucyi, Sheinman and Defrin, three hypotheses were tested: 1) Whether feigned performance could be detected using warmth and pain threshold measurements; 2) whether there were changes in the statistical properties of performance when participants were faking; and 3) whether an “interference” or distractor presented during testing interferes with the ability to fake and therefore provide a clue to when someone is being sincere or not.

Using university students (I hope they got course credits for participating!) who were not health science students, and were otherwise healthy, the investigators gave very little information about the procedure or hypotheses to minimise expectancy bias. Participants were then tested using a thermal stimulator to obtain “warmth sensation threshold” and “heat-pain thresholds” – this is a form of quantitative sensory testing (QST). TENS was used as a distractor in the experimental case, applied for 2 minutes before measuring the pain threshold, and during the heat pain threshold test. This was repeated with first the threshold test, then TENS. Participants were asked to pretend they were in an insurance office, being tested to establish whether they were experiencing genuine pain, after being told the test would be able to tell whether their pain was real.

What did they find out?

Well in situation one, where both threshold and warmth detection were used, and participants were asked to fake the pain intensity, respondents gave higher warmth detection ratings than normal. Not only this, but the ability to repeat the same response with the same temperature was poorer.  Heat pain threshold was also consistently different between the sincere and faked conditions, with heat pain threshold lower when people were faking (to around 3 degrees).

When the second testing option was carried out (using TENS to distract), heat pain threshold was significant lower when participants were faking, and the variance of the feigned + interference condition was three times that of the sincere condition, and the CV of the feigned + interference condition was twice that of the sincere condition.

What does this mean?

Well first of all, it means there are some consistent effects of faking in response to tests of warmth and heat-pain threshold when a distractor like TENS is used. Increased reports of warmth threshold and reduced heat pain threshold were observed, and where statistically significant. Interestingly, it was only when a distractor was used that the variability of reports were found – these authors suggest that people are pretty skilled at giving consistent reports when they’re not being distracted by an additional sensory stimulus.

Now here’s where I begin to pull this apart from a clinical and practical perspective. The authors, to give them credit, indicate that the research is both new and that it may identify some people who do have pain as malingerers. My concerns are that people with chronic pain may not look at all like healthy young university students.

We know very little about the responses to QST by people with different forms of chronic pain. We already know that people with impaired descending noxious inhibitory control respond differently to some forms of QST. We also know that contextual factors including motivation can influence how nervous systems respond to input. But my concerns are far more about the potential harm to those who are tested and found to be malingering when they’re not.

What do you do if you think a person is faking? How do you deal with this? What good does it do to suggest to someone their pain is not real, or isn’t nearly as bad as they make out? Once the words are out of your mouth (or written in a report) any chance of a therapeutic relationship has just flown right out the door. And you’re still left with a person who says they’re having trouble – but now you have an angry, resentful person who has a strong need to prove that they DO have pain.

You see, I think it might be more fruitful to ask why is this person faking pain? If it’s simply for money, surely there are far easier ways to get money than pretending to be disabled by pain? If it’s the case that a person is off out fishing or playing golf or living it up when “supposed” to be in pain, wouldn’t it make more sense to reframe their response as either recovering well (doing what’s healthy) and therefore get on with returning to work; or use a private investigator to demonstrate that he or she is actually capable of doing more than they indicate?

The presence or absence of pain is not really the problem, IMHO. To me we need to address the degree of disability that’s being attributed to pain and work on that. Maybe a greater focus on reducing disability rather than on expensive procedures to remove pain or otherwise get rid of pain is in order?

Kucyi, A., Sheinman, A., Defrin, R. (in press). Distinguishing feigned from sincere performance in psychophysical pain testing. The Journal of Pain.

How good is the TSK as a measure of “kinesiophobia”?

The Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia is a measure commonly used to determine whether a person is afraid of moving because of beliefs about harm or damage, with a second scale assessing current avoidance behaviour. It has been a popular measure along with the pain-related fear and avoidance model and together with the model and measures of disability, catastrophising and pain-related anxiety, has become one of the mainstays within pain assessment.

There have been numerous questions raised about this measure in terms of reliability and validity, but the measure continues to be one that is widely used. The problems with reliability relate mainly to a long version (TSK-17) in which several items are reverse scored. Reverse scored items often state a negative version of one of the concepts being assessed by the measure, but pose problems to people completing the measure because it’s hard to respond to a double negative.  In terms of validity, although the measure has been used a great deal and the original studies examining the psychometric properties of the instrument showed predictive validity, the TSK’s ability to predict response to treatment hasn’t been evaluated.

Chris Gregg and colleagues from The Back Institute and CBI Health Group studied a cohort of 313 people with low back pain attending one of the rehabilitation clinics in New Zealand. Participants completed the TSK at the beginning of treatment, and again at programme completion.  Along with the TSK, participants also completed a numeric pain scale, a modified Low Back Outcome score, and indicated whether they were working or not. These latter measures were considered to be “Quality of Life” measures, although they’re not officially QoL scales.

Before I turn to the study design and statistics, I’ll take a look at the modified Low Back Outcome score. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever searched for something like this, but believe me when I say there are SO many versions of SO many different “modified” back pain questionnaires, it’s really hard to work out exactly which one is the one used in this study, nor how it was modified. I’m assuming that it’s the one mentioned in Holt, Shaw, Shetty and Greenough (2002) because it’s mentioned in the references, but I don’t know the modifications made to it.  The LBOS is a fairly brief 12 item measure looking at pain intensity “on average” over the last week, work status, functional activities, rest, treatment seeking, analgesic use, and another five broad activities (sex life, sleeping, walking, traveling and dressing). It’s been described as having good internal consistency and test-retest reliability but validity isn’t mentioned in the 2002 paper.

Now, coming to this study, overall people improved at the completion of the programme. Pain reduced by 1.84 on the NPS, m-LBOS scores increased by 10.4 (a 28% improvement), and the TSK scores also improved by 5.5. Of course, we’d hope that at the end of a programme people would be doing better – though I’d prefer to see outcomes measured at least another three to 9 months after programme completion.

The authors looked at the relationship between the TSK and initial scores – there were small  statistical relationships between these measures. They then examined the scores between pre-treatment TSK and QoL measures at the end of treatment to establish whether there was a relationship between kinesiophobia and eventual outcome. There wasn’t. At least, not much of a relationship. These authors conclude that the TSK is therefore not a good measure to employ to predict those at high risk of chronicity due to fear of movement. I was a bit disappointed to see that a subscale analysis of the TSK wasn’t carried out – so it’s not possible to know whether change was associated with reduced beliefs about fear of harm/reinjury or whether it was due to reduced avoidance, or both.

Now here’s where I get a bit tangled up. Wouldn’t you expect the underlying constructs of the TSK (fear of harm/reinjury, and avoidance) to be the targets of a back pain related treatment? Especially one that includes cognitive behavioural therapy, education and movement? If we’re using a measure I think we should USE it within our clinical reasoning, and deliberately target those factors thought to be associated with poor outcomes. If we’re successful, then we should be able to see a change in domains thought to be associated with those constructs. In this programme, given that people were given treatment based on sub-typing, including education and CBT, I would hope that pain-related fear and avoidance would be directly targeted so that people develop effective ways of dealing with unhelpful beliefs and behaviours. To establish whether that had happened I’d want to look at the association between post-treatment TSK and measures of function or disability.

And getting back to the timing of outcome assessment, given that we’re interested in people managing any residual back pain (and in this study people were left with pain scores on the NPS of 3.4 (+/- 2.4) they still had some pain), wouldn’t you be interested in how they were managing a bit further down the track? We can (almost) guarantee that people will make changes directly as an effect of attention and structured activities. Measuring what occurs immediately at the completion of a programme may not show us much about what happens once that person has carried on by him or herself for a few months. My experience with chronic pain programmes shows a typical pattern of improvement immediately at the end of a programme, then six weeks later, what can be called regression to the mean, or what we often described as “the dip” or “the slump” as reality hits the road. At a further six months down the track, results had improved a bit, and these were usually sustained (or thereabouts) at the following twelve month follow-up.

So, does this study provide us with evidence that the TSK isn’t useful as a predictive tool? I’m not so sure. I think it does show that there are improvements in TSK, pain, disability and work status immediately at the end of a programme. Unfortunately TSK scores at the end of the programme are not analysed into subscales, so we don’t know which aspects of pain-related fear and avoidance were affected – but we know that they were.

For clinicians working in chronic pain programmes, where people are referred after having remained disabled and/or distressed despite having had prior treatment, the TSK may not be the most useful tool ever. The problems I’ve had with it are that scores in the fear of injury/reinjury subscale are lower when people have been given good pain “education” – but often present with a combined high score because of very high scores on the avoidance subscale.

A lovely study by Bunzli, Smith, Watkins, Schütze and O’Sullivan (2014) looked at what people actually believe about their pain and the associated TSK items. They found that many people DO believe their pain indicates harm, and they also found that people were worried about the effect pain would have on other things – and it’s this part that I find particularly interesting. It may not be the pain that matters as much as the anticipated losses and disruption to normal life that could occur.

The original authors of the “fear-avoidance” model, Vlaeyen and Linto (2012) reviewed the model after 12 years, and agree there is much to be done to refine assessment of pain-related fear. Self-report measures are only as good as the ability, insight and willingness of participants to complete them accurately.

So, is it time to throw the TSK out the window? I don’t think so – at least not yet. There’s more we need to do to understand pain-related fear and subsequent avoidance.

 

Chris D. Gregg, Greg McIntosh, Hamilton Hall, Heather Watson, David Williams, Chris Hoffman, The relationship between the tampa scale of kinesiophobia and low back pain rehabilitation outcomes, The Spine Journal (2015), http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.spinee.2015.08.018.

Bunzli, S., Smith, A., Watkins, R., Schütze, R., & O’Sullivan, P. (2014). “What Do People who Score Highly on the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia Really Believe? A Mixed Methods Investigation in People with Chronic Non Specific Low Back Pain The Clinical Journal of Pain DOI: 10.1097/AJP.0000000000000143

Vlaeyen, J. W., & Linton, S. J. (2012). Fear-avoidance model of chronic musculoskeletal pain: 12 years on. Pain, 153(6), 1144-1147. doi: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2011.12.009

Central sensitisation – can a questionnaire help find out who is, and who isn’t?

My orthopaedic colleagues have been asking for a way to identify which surgical candidate is unlikely to have a good outcome after major joint surgery. They know that between 10 – 50% of people undergoing surgery will have chronic pain.  5 – 10% of those people experiencing pain that’s rated >5/10 on a numeric rating scale where 0 = no pain, and 10 = most severe pain you can imagine ( Kehlet, Jensen, & Woolf, 2006). The people with severe pain are the kind of people who hear “well the surgery I did went well…” and can be left wondering why they ever decided to go ahead with their surgery.

Two main factors seem to be important in postsurgical chronic pain: the presence of central sensitisation (usually indicated by reporting chronic pain in at least two other areas of the body) and catastrophising. I’ve discussed catastrophising a great deal here and here .

What I haven’t talked about is central sensitisation. Now, the idea that people can experience chronic pain associated with changes in the way the nervous system responds to stimuli isn’t new, but the neurobiology of it is still slowly being unravelled.  I’m not going to get into definitions or whether having changes in the nervous system equates with “chronic pain” (because pain is an experience and the neurobiology is just the scaffolding that seems present, the two are not equivalent). I want to talk about the measurement of this “sensitisation” and whether a pen and paper tool might be one way of screening people who are at greatest risk of developing problems if they proceed with surgery.

First of all, what symptoms come under this broad heading of “response to an abnormally sensitised nervous system”? Well, Yunus (2007) proposed that because there are similarities between several so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel disorder and so on, perhaps there is a common aetiology for them. Based on evidence that central sensitisation involves enhanced processing of many sensory experiences, Yunus proposed the term “central sensitivity syndrome” – basically a disorder of the nociceptive system. Obviously it’s pretty complicated, but various researchers have proposed that “dysregulation in both ascending and descending central nervous system pathways as a result of physical trauma and sustained pain impulses, and the chronic release of pro-inflammatory cytokines by the immune system, as a result of physical trauma or viral infection… including a dysfunction of the stress system, including the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (Mayer, Neblett, Cohen, Howard, Choi et al, 2012, p. 277)”. (what are “pain impulses”?!)

By proposing this mechanism, various researchers have been able to pull together a number of symptoms that people experience, and their premise is that the more symptoms individuals endorse, the more likely it is that they have an underlying central sensitisation disorder.

The authors completed a literature review to identify symptoms and comorbidities associated with fibromyalgia and the other disorders they believe indicate a sensitised central nervous system. they then develop a self-report instrument and asked people with these problems to complete it, and compared their results with a group of people who wouldn’t usually be thought to have any sensitisation problems (students and staff at a University – we could argue this, but let’s not!).

What they found, after much statistical analysis, is a four factor measure:

Factor 1 – Physical Symptoms (30.9%)
Factor 2 – Emotional Distress (7.2%)
Factor 3 – Headache/Jaw Symptoms (10.1%)
Factor 4 – Urological Symptoms (5.2%)

Test-retest reliability was established, and because the questionnaire could discriminate between those who reported widespread pain (aka fibromyalgia) and those who had no pain, it’s thought to have discriminant validity as well. (BTW a copy of this measure is included in the appendix of the Mayer, Neblett, Cohen, Howard, Choi, Williams et al (2012) paper – go get it!)

The researchers then went on to look at some norms for the measure and found that amongst people with chronic pain, referred to an outpatient multidisciplinary pain centre, those with more diagnosed “central sensitisation syndromes” scored more highly on this measure, and that a score of 40 on the measure was able to discriminate between those who didn’t have sensitisation and those who did (Neblett, Cohen, Choi, Hartzell, Williams, Mayer & Gatchel, 2013).

Well and good. What does it actually mean?

This is where I think this measure can come unstuck. I like the idea of people being asked about their pain and associated symptoms. We often don’t have time in a clinical interview to ask about the enormous range of symptoms people experience, so being able to get people to fill out a pen and paper measure to take stock of the different things people know about themselves is a good thing.

What this measure doesn’t yet do is indicate whether there is any underlying common causal link between these experiences. It’s tautological to list the symptoms people might experience with central sensitisation based on the literature, then ask them to indicate which ones they experience and then conclude “oh yes! this means they have central sensitisation!” All it means is that these people report similar symptoms.

What needs to happen, and is now beginning to occur, are studies examining central nervous system processing and the scores individuals obtain on this measure. That, and establishing whether, by completing this questionnaire, it is possible to predict who is more or less likely to develop things like post-surgical chronic pain. Now that would be a really good measure, and very likely to be used by my orthopaedic colleagues.

In the meantime, whatever this measure indicates, it seems to be able to differentiate between people who are more likely to report “medically unexplained symptoms” and people who don’t. This might be useful as we begin to look at targeting treatment to suit different types of persistent pain. At this point in time, though, I think this measure is more useful in research than clinical practice.

 

Kehlet H, Jensen TS, Woolf CJ. Persistent postsurgical pain: risk factors and prevention. Lancet. 2006;367:1618–1625

Mayer, T.G., Neblett, R., Cohen, H., Howard, K.J., Choi, Y.H., Williams, M.J., . . . Gatchel, R.J. (2012). The development and psychometric validation of the central sensitization inventory. Pain Practice, 12(4), 276-285. doi: 10.1111/j.1533-2500.2011.00493.x

Neblett, R., Cohen, H., Choi, Y., Hartzell, M.M., Williams, M., Mayer, T.G., & Gatchel, R.J. (2013). The central sensitization inventory (csi): Establishing clinically significant values for identifying central sensitivity syndromes in an outpatient chronic pain sample. The Journal of Pain, 14(5), 438-445. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2012.11.012

Roussel, N.A., Nijs, J., Meeus, M., Mylius, V., Fayt, C., & Oostendorp, R. (2013). Central sensitization and altered central pain processing in chronic low back pain: Fact or myth? Clin J Pain, 29, 625-638. doi: 10.1097/AJP.0b013e31826f9a71

Van Oosterwijck, J., Nijs, J., Meeus, M., & Paul, L. (2013). Evidence for central sensitization in chronic whiplash: A systematic literature review. European Journal of Pain, 17(3), 299-312. doi: 10.1002/j.1532-2149.2012.00193.x

Yunus, M.B. (2007). Fibromyalgia and overlapping disorders: The unifying concept of central sensitivity syndromes. Seminars in Arthritis & Rheumatism, 36(6), 339-356.

Accepting pain – or are we measuring something else?

Acceptance. Ask a person living with chronic pain whether they accept their pain and the answer is highly probably a resounding “No!”. It’s a word that evokes resignation, feeling helpless and giving up. Or at least that’s what many qualitative papers seem to show (Afrell, Biguet, Rudebeck, 2007; Baker, Gallois, Driedger & Santesso, 2011; Budge, Carryer & Boddy, 2012; Clarke & Iphofen, 2007; Lachapelle, Lavoie & Boudreau, 2008; Risdon, Eccleston, Crombez & McCracken, 2003). I remember when hearing a person tell me “Oh I accept my pain” thinking that this was often a clear indication that underneath it all, the person was pretty angry about the unfairness of pain impacting on their life.

Acceptance is defined in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as “a willingness to remain in contact with and to actively experience particular private experiences (Hayes, Jacobson, Follette, Dougher, 1994) (eds): Acceptance and Change: Content and Context in Psychotherapy. Reno, Context Press, 1994), and from this Lance McCracken and colleagues developed the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire. This measure has two dimensions: willingness to experience pain and engaging in values-directed activity despite pain.  The other way acceptance has been defined draws from self-regulation, and argues that withdrawing from goals that can’t be achieved, in order to turn to goals that can be achieved is a positive way to cope with life – acceptance is defined as disengaging from a goal to get rid of pain and instead, re-engaging in other goals that aren’t affected as much by pain.

Lauwerier, Caes, Van Damme, Goubert and Rosseel (2015) have recently published a paper reviewing the various instruments that purport to measure pain acceptance. In their analysis, a coding scheme was developed consisting of the three main aspects of acceptance that seem to represent the concept: disengaging from controlling pain, pain willingness (in certain circumstances), and engaging in other valued activities. These three concepts were drawn from the literature – and then there were the left-over concepts that were also present in measures of acceptance. These are the interesting ones!

The addition five codes were: controlling pain, pain costs, pain benefits, unclear and no fit.

They identified 18 difference instruments, of which five didn’t specifically measure acceptance of chronic pain or illness and were therefore excluded from the study, leaving 13 measures to review. The one mentioned the most in the studies reviewed was the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire-2o.

Moving on to the results, what did these researchers find? And of course, why does it matter

Well, most of the instruments were measuring aspects of acceptance – the Brief Pain Coping Inventory, Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire-A and CPAQ-20, and the Pain Solutions Questionnaire. The original CPAQ and the PASOL were the only two measures with moderate (but the highest percentage) of items with all three acceptance features (disengagement from pain control, pain willingness, and engaging in activity other than pain control), and interestingly, most instruments included “engaging in activities other than pain control”, while the other two factors were less well-represented.

Even more interesting is that many of the items in these instruments were classified as “controlling pain” – in other words, measuring how willing individuals are to carry on with life without trying to control pain. At the same time, many of the instruments also measured “pain costs” – such as “because of my illness, I miss the things I like to do best”.

Then these researchers did some pretty fancy analysis, looking at dimensions contained within all the items from all the measures. What they found was a 2-dimensional solution, with one dimension going from “fully engaged in valued activities” (my description!) to “pain costs”, and the other axis going from “pain willingness” to “controlling pain”.

Conclusions and why this is important

Most of the assessment measures contained some of the concepts thought to be important in pain acceptance, but the aspect most commonly found was engaging in activities other than controlling pain. Items measuring disengaging from trying to control pain, and pain willingness were found less often, while many measures incorporate pain control, and some that reflected pain costs or were unclear. This research seems to show that engagement in activities other than pain control and pain willingness are key features of items measuring acceptance, but at the same time show that not many measures look at both of these concepts together.  Additionally, this research shows that many supposedly “acceptance” instruments actually measure attempts to control pain but then reverse score these items – this can mean that people using these measures interpret them as avoidance measures rather than willingness to experience pain – appealing to quite a different theoretical model (the avoidance or fear-avoidance model) rather than a pain acceptance model.

Why is this research important? Well, acceptance is still a relatively new concept in pain research and clinical practice. While it has been talked about a great deal, and there are numerous studies of acceptance, the instruments developed for such research have not been around very long, and as we can see, don’t always adequately represent the fullness of the theoretical domains. Some aspects are not well-represented or are at risk of being misinterpreted. What works in a research setting may not always be accurately transferred to a clinical setting, especially if clinicians pick up a new measure without reading the theoretical basis for its development.

I also argue on the basis of my research that “disengaging from trying to control pain” doesn’t only need to be represented by items suggesting that people no longer seek treatment. From my findings based on people who live well with chronic pain, treatment is still a feature – but the investment in the outcome of treatment is far less. It’s less important that the pain is removed, treatment is “an option” rather than a necessary part of “returning to normal”.

I also argue that pain willingness is conditional upon the values placed on the activities the individual wants to do. So, if the activity is boring, unpleasant, hard work or doesn’t have rewards to the individual, the person is more than likely to avoid it, but if it’s highly valued then pain becomes a less dominant factor in the decision to do it.

Why should clinicians care? Because acceptance is an exciting and fruitful aspect of living well with pain that we can incorporate into our treatments. Acceptance is about learning to live well, “being with” or “making space” for the presence of pain, so that the other aspects of life are able to be engaged in. That’s important given how few people can have their pain completely reduced.

 

 
Lauwerier, E., Caes, L., Van Damme, S., Goubert, L., Rosseel, Y., & Crombez, G. (2015). Acceptance: What’s in a Name? A Content Analysis of Acceptance Instruments in Individuals With Chronic Pain The Journal of Pain, 16 (4), 306-317 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpain.2015.01.001

Afrell, M., Biguet, G., & Rudebeck, C.E. (2007). Living with a body in pain — between acceptance and denial. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 21(3), 291-296.

Baker, S.C., Gallois, C., Driedger, S., & Santesso, N. (2011). Communication accommodation and managing musculoskeletal disorders: Doctors’ and patients’ perspectives. Health Communication, 26(4), 379-388. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2010.551583

Budge, C., Carryer, J., & Boddy, J. (2012). Learning from people with chronic pain: Messages for primary care practitioners. Journal of Primary Health Care, 4(4), 306-312.

Clarke, K.A., & Iphofen, R. (2007). Accepting pain management or seeking pain cure: An exploration of patients’ attitudes to chronic pain. Pain Management Nursing, 8(2), 102-110.

Eccleston C, Crombez G. (2007). Worry and chronic pain: A misdirected problem solving model. Pain, 132(3), 233-236.

Hayes, Jacobson, Follette, Dougher. (eds)(1994).  Acceptance and Change: Content and Context in Psychotherapy. Reno, Context Press.

Lachapelle, D.L., Lavoie, S., & Boudreau, A. (2008). The meaning and process of pain acceptance. Perceptions of women living with arthritis and fibromyalgia. Pain Research & Management, 13(3), 201-210.

Risdon, A., Eccleston, C., Crombez, G., & McCracken, L. (2003). How can we learn to live with pain?: A q-methodological analysis of the diverse understandings of acceptance of chronic pain. Social Science & Medicine, 56(2), 375-386. doi: dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00043-6

Numbers on a scale: How bad did you say your pain was?

Have you ever been asked to give your pain rating on a scale of 0 – 10 (where 0 = no pain at all and 10 = most extreme pain you can imagine)? Have you ever tried to work out whether today’s pain is worse than yesterdays? What does a pain rating tell us?

I’ve struggled to work out how “bad” my pain is many times, is it the pain intensity that makes it troublesome? Or, in the case of a migraine, is it the quality of the pain that makes it bad (or the nausea?). Health professionals often ask people to summarise their pain experience into a form that (hopefully) we can all understand – but just what does a pain that’s around 4/10 on a VAS actually mean?

Why do we use rating scales?

We know that pain is subjective, just like taste and colour. While we might be able to agree that both of us are tasting something we call “banana”, we don’t know whether the banana taste I experience is the same as the banana taste you experience. We can see that both of us are eating the same fruit, but we don’t know how our body/brain processes that experience. Instead we assume, or infer, that we’re experiencing it in a similar way because of the similarities in context.

With pain, the situation is even more complex: we can’t determine whether the pain I feel is similar to the pain another person feels, and we don’t even have the benefit of similar “tissue damage” in the case of a migraine headache.

So, we have to infer something about the experience through some sort of common mechanism. Mostly that’s language. We hope that someone can understand that a higher number means greater pain. We hope the person can recognise what “no pain” feels like and where it might be represented on a scale. We ask the person to remember their current pain intensity, translate it into a number that in turn represents to us some kind of common understanding of what pain given that number might feel like.

Of course, there are problems with numbers on a scale. For a child who doesn’t understand the association between numbers on a scale and intensity, we use the “Faces” scale. For a person with cognitive problems (brain injury, stroke, dementia), we observe their behaviour (and hope we can translate well enough). For a person who doesn’t speak the same language as us, we might try a sliding scale with green at the bottom and red at the top, to represent increasing intensity – appealing, perhaps, to a common understanding that green = OK and red = not OK.

Worse than the difficulty translating from experience to a number is the common misunderstanding that pain severity alone represents the “what it is like” to experience pain. We know personally that it doesn’t – after all, who has had a toothache that represents “Oh no, I need a root canal and that’s going to cost a bomb!”, or “Ouch! That lemon juice in the paper cut on my finger is really annoying”, or “I feel so sick, this migraine is horrible”.

Hopefully most health professionals are taught that to use just one measure of pain is not enough. It’s important to also include other aspects of pain such as quality, how it affects function (interference), how confident we are to deal with life despite the pain (self efficacy).

So we use rating scales as a shorthand way to get to understand a tiny bit of what it is like to have pain. But the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) is used many times to estimate whether “this person’s pain is so bad they need medication”, or “this person’s pain means we can’t expect her to help move herself from the ambulance trolley to the wheelchair”. The VAS can be used in many ways it shouldn’t be.

Studying the relationship between VAS pain intensity and disability (SF36)

The study by Boonstra, Schiphorst Preuper, Balk & Stewart (in press) aimed to identify cut-off points on the VAS to establish “mild”, “moderate” and “severe” using three different statistical approaches.  They measured pain using a Verbal Rating Scale (mild, moderate and severe), the VAS, and used several scales from the SF36 (a measure of general health quality) to establish interference from pain.

What they found was that while “mild” pain was fairly equally determined (less than or equal to 3.5), and correlated with both severity and function, when it came to “moderate” and “severe” pain, there was far less agreement. In fact, this group found that individuals could verbally rate their pain as “moderate” but at the same time report severe levels of interference. This means verbal descriptors under-represent the impact of pain on performance.

They also found that the cut-off point between “mild” and “moderate” pain in terms of interference with activity ranged between 2.5 – 4.5, and for moderate to severe pain between 4.5 – 7.4.  The associations between pain intensity and disability or interference were low to moderate and as a result these authors argue that it is “questionable” to translate VAS scores into verbal descriptors, because the different instruments measure different things.

What does this tell us?

It should be easy by now to tell that although we use numbers as a shorthand for “how bad is your pain?” in reality, they don’t directly translate the “what it is like” to have pain. Neither does the VAS correlate well with measures of disability or interference from pain. While people with mild pain might be also experiencing only a little disability, when the numbers go up the relationship between intensity and function disappear.

I think we might be trying to quantify an experience as a quick way to make clinical decisions. Really, when we ask “how bad is your pain”, depending on the context, we may be asking “do you need pain relief?”, “do you need help to move?”, “did my treatment help?” or any myriad other questions. The trouble is in research, we can’t do statistics nearly as easily on a “yes” or “really bad” or “it didn’t change much” answer. But how many of us work routinely in research settings?

I wonder whether it’s worth asking ourselves: do I need to ask for a pain rating, or should I ask a more useful question? And take the time to listen to the answer.

 

Anne M. Boonstra, Henrica R. Schiphorst Preuper, Gerlof A. Balk, & Roy E.Stewart (2014). Cut-off points for mild, moderate and severe pain on the VAS for pain for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain Pain DOI: http://dx..org/10.1016/j.pain.2014.09.014

Individualising explanations with case formulation

One of the assumptions of a multidimensional model of pain, particularly chronic pain, is that somehow all the various elements get pulled together to explain why this person is presenting in this way at this time. It’s also one of the least-discussed aspects of pain management: case formulation.

Case formulation is the process of generating a set of hypotheses to explain what is going on when a person has chronic pain. It needs to reflect what is known about biological mechanisms, including comorbidities; psychological aspects such as beliefs, attitudes, expectations, pre-existing strengths and capabilities; and social and contextual aspects such as supportive relationships, availability of health services, employment and so on. It should help explain how facets of the situation have arisen, and what is maintaining them.  It should guide intervention, and identify treatment targets, and most importantly, it should help the person feel he or she is being heard and help them understand why certain approaches are taken.

What often happens, however, is that a person with pain is assessed comprehensively – and the findings are filed away, or used only as “baseline recordings”, treatment carries on using “I have a hammer, all I’ll use are nails”, and the particular concerns of the person remain untouched.  Alternatively, the assessments are discussed by the team (if there is one) and the most socially capable or dominant person holds sway, or the training orientation of one or more clinicians, or even the “programmes we deliver” guides choice – and the same recipe given out. I can recite a couple in my sleep “home exercise programme, hydrotherapy, relaxation and pain education” with OT, PT, and psychology.  The particular needs of this person at this time are not identified, and treatment is pretty generic.

We’ve come a long way in understanding that people who have chronic pain are not one big homogenous group: they are all unique although they may share some similarities. We also know that our treatments don’t fit for everyone – or at least, some of us recognise this. The vast majority of people with chronic pain do not have a tidy diagnosis, a treatable disease process with known mechanisms. This means our treatments need to target things that can be changed, and accommodate those things that can’t be changed. Herein lies the challenge of deciding whether pain intensity should be The Target, or whether helping the person move towards acceptance, function and a future focus might be more helpful.  What I know, both from experience and my research, is that while the offer of reduced pain is present, people hold onto the hope that life will return to “normal”. It’s very hard to consider a new future when the hope of things returning to normal remains.

Breaking it down, case formulation begins by identifying problem areas, then identifying factors that maintain the problem or get in the way of recovering. The person with pain must be part of this process – it’s their life we’re talking about, and because most of what we’re hoping to do involves them doing things differently we need to ensure they’re part of the process from the beginning.

There are numerous domains typically included in pain assessments: the one I’m most familiar with involves biomedical details including diagnosis, comorbidities, presence/absence of neurological deficits, history of trauma/injury/central sensitivity and current medications. Psychosocial information includes looking at the pain experience (intensity, qualities, location, pattern), beliefs, emotions, distress, self-efficacy, substance use, family relationships, social reinforcements. Functional information includes work, physical performance across a set range of activities, strength, range of movement and cardiovascular fitness.

But what is this person’s problems? What does this person identify as bothering them the most? What would they be doing if pain was less of a problem?

Beginning there, a person might point out that he just doesn’t know what his pain means, so it’s highly threatening. He’s really worried about his job because he’s been told he should avoid “heavy lifting”, and he believes this is because he has “desiccated discs” and “bone grinding on bone”, and he lies awake at night worrying that he’ll never be able to be a good Dad who plays ball with the kids. The person might also mention that his partner is really worried, and tries to stop him doing normal things around the home because she’s worried he’ll have a flare-up. She’s also inclined to fuss over him, and he feels increasingly useless because he thinks he should be caring for her, rather than her caring for him.

Untangling all of this might take time, but often by using a diagram like the one below (I’ve used this as a template for years), a team can begin to consider the mechanisms involved. This is taken from Sharp, Timothy J. (2001). Chronic pain: a reformulation of the cognitive-behavioural model. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39(7), 787-800. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(00)00061-9

So, let’s plug in some of the information we’ve got.

I use questionnaires, history-taking, observation and clinical testing to gather this information – and compare this person’s scores with normative data from other people from a similar demographic. This helps identify how differently this person presents from other people I’ve seen, and guides where to prioritise intervention. Along with the person’s main priority, which in this case was sleep and work, and the “logic” from published literature developed from empirical studies, the team and the person with pain can identify where to start.

The only place I’ve found a good description and discussion of this process of clinical reasoning is from Linton & Nicholas, 2008, from a book edited by Harald Breivik, Michael Nicholas, William Campbell, Toby Newton-John, called Clinical Pain Management Second Edition: Practice and Procedures, 2008: CRC Press. It’s not available electronically, but if you can access a copy at your local medical library, this chapter alone is worth getting.