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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My guidelines for working through “pain mechanisms”?

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

What to do instead of explaining mechanisms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do occupational therapists add to pain management/rehabilitation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making sense: Does it help people with pain?

I love it when my biases are challenged (seriously, I do!). And in the study I’m talking about today, my biases are sorely challenged – but perhaps not as much as I initially thought.

Lance McCracken is one of my favourite researchers investigating processes of acceptance and living a good life in the presence of chronic pain. In this paper, he collaborates with a colleague currently involved in the INPUT pain management programme established at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS originally by Michael Nicholas who draws on a CBT model of pain management, and now more firmly in the third wave camp of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The paper is ‘Making sense’ and describes a cross-sectional study of sense-making by people with chronic pain attending the INPUT programme.

Making sense is something humans do without even thinking about it. Humans are prone to (and probably for good adaptive reasons) generate patterns out of random information. We gaze at shadows at night and think we see faces or intruders, and we look at clouds and see dragons and kittens. When we’re sore we also try to make sense of what’s going on – does this ouch feel like something I’ve had before? does it feel mysterious or can I carry on? have other people I know had this same ouch and what did they do?

In the search for making sense out of pain that otherwise seems random, clinicians have, since time immemorial, generated all sorts of stories about what might be going on. The wandering uterus. The evil spirit. The slipped disc. The leg length discrepancy. Clinicians, when faced with their own uncertainty about what exactly pain represents, can encourage patients to seek diagnosis: some sort of “explanation” for the problem. When that’s insufficient, more recently we’ve seen the flourishing of explanations for pain from a neurobiological perspective, particularly “pain as an expression of threat to bodily integrity”, a decision that is “made by the brain”.

My own research, investigating the experiences of people who indicated they live well with pain, reflected this same process. They sought a name for their experience, they wanted to understand the impact of pain on daily doing – those fluctuations and variances that emerge during the days and weeks early in the journey of learning that this pain isn’t going anywhere soon (Lennox Thompson, et al., 2019). Note that the group of people I recruited had come to the point where they identified that they were living well with pain – this group of people represent a small percentage of those who live with chronic pain, and not those who are seeking treatment.

OK, so what did McCracken and Scott (2022) find?

Bear in mind that this study was designed to measure the construct of sense-making in people seeking treatment for chronic pain. Also bear in mind the authors come from a perspective of functional contextualism, or a philosophy of science that argues for “…studying the current and historical context in which behavior evolves … to develop analytic concepts and rules that are useful for predicting and changing psychological events in a variety of settings.” What this means to me is that the form of whatever behaviour we’re observing/measuring matters less that the purpose or function of that behaviour in a specific context.

OK, on with the study.

451 adults attending an interprofessional pain management programme were participants in this study, and the measures were taken before they started treatment. They completed a battery of measures including ones measuring acceptance, cognitive fusion, committed action, tolerance of uncertainty, and pain measures such as the Brief Pain Inventory, numeric rating scale.

The research aim was to investigate a way to measure not only the positives from sense-making, but also the potential adverse effects of doing so. Concurrent with developing the measure, analyses of the inflexible ways we make sense were carried out in relation to outcomes: pain interference, depression and participation.

In the results (read through the analysis, BTW, it’s beautifully detailed), women were found to overthink compared with men, older people tended to want to avoid a sense of incoherence, and more educated people also tended to overthink.

Now, a little theory: coherence can be either literal or functional. Literal coherence is like “common sense” – so if I interpret my pain as meaning something is damaged, and moving it is bad, this is literal coherence. Functional coherence might occur when I realise that I hurt whether I’m doing things, or not, and I decide “this is how it is, I might as well get on with life”. In effect, as McCracken and Scott say, “these terms reflect the difference between language, thoughts and behavior fitting together consistently, (thoughts agree with other thoughts and behavior) versus behavior and goals in life fitting together consistently (behavior patterns succeed in reaching goals even when this seems to contradict “good sense”).

In daily life, people consistently prefer to solve problems and avoid insoluble problems. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Why try to deal with things that won’t change, even if we try hard to change them? BUT then we have insoluble problems that don’t make sense: the earthquakes in Christchurch New Zealand in 2011-2013 were random and we hadn’t had earthquake activity in our city for centuries – consequently we had many crackpots coming up with “predictions” for the next swarm of earthquakes based on phases of the moon or fracking or climate change. Anything to help people feel like they had a sense of control over something that did not make sense.

Chronic pain is often an equally insoluble problem. Many times pain like this does not make sense at all. No injury precipitated my fibromyalgia. There’s no imaging or biomarker for pain intensity. Existing biomedical diagnoses based on structural or biochemical or neurological processes don’t tell us much about who might get chronic pain, how intense it might be, or the impact of that pain on a person’s life. But clinicians and people with pain earnestly seek something, something to explain what’s going on.

For both clinicians and people living with pain, constantly searching for The Thing to explain pain can be exhausting, demoralising and linked to unhelpful patterns of behaviour. Clinicians might repeat the same treatment even though it didn’t work the first time. They might refer the person for more investigations, just in case something was missed. They might refer the person to another clinician, or, worse, they may attribute the pain to “mental illness” or “psychosocial factors”. Many, many clinicians think that giving a person a book about how pain might be constructed “in the brain” will be enough for people to make sense of what’s going on. People with pain might be afraid to get on with life in case they’re doing harm, or because they’re hoping the fix might be around the corner and life can “get back to normal”. They may spend enormous sums of money, time and emotion on treatments to either diagnose the problem, or treat it. They might spend hours brooding on what it could be. Their lives often stop – people with pain have called this “the endless limbo”.

Now there is a measure of sense-making I guess we’ll find out more about this part of learning to live with pain. The three subscales identified were “avoidance of incoherence”, “overthinking”, and “functional coherence”, though the last subscale had poor psychometric properties so wasn’t included in the final analyses.

My wish, however, is that rather than applying this measure to people attempting to make sense of something outside of their experience, we might develop a measure of how rigidly clinicians stick to “coherence” in the face of puzzling pain problems. Perhaps what might be even more influential, we might develop a measure of what happens when a vulnerable person trying to make sense of their pain meets a clinician with a high level of inflexibility about “what is going on”, because despite all the research we have into people living with pain, we haven’t yet recognised the power of the clinician in perpetuating unhelpful inflexibility.

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

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

“The social” – a brief look at family

Our most important relationships, the ones we learn most from, probably occur in families (Bowlby, 1978). As kids, even before we begin to speak, we observe our family members – and there’s reasonable evidence showing that how well these early relationships develop influences our experience of pain and how we express it.

I had the occasion to read a little about adolescent and children’s pain, and the influence of parents on young people as they grow up. There’s a great deal of research interest in children’s pain because children with persistent pain grow up to be adults – usually also with persistent pain. And good evidence that parents with persistent pain can, through mechanisms including depression and catastrophising, influence pain and disability in their children (Brown et al., 2022; Brown et al., 2021).

The research is fascinating. Some studies investigating predictors of chronic pain in children, some investigating disability – and a small number of studies looking at what we can do to help parents cope with the pain their children are experiencing. Not many studies (54 in a 2021 scoping review – see Lee et al., 2021). And sooooo many studies focusing exclusively, or close to, the influence of Mothers on children. Where’s Dad? Can I repeat that: where’s Dad?

More recent studies indicate the number of Fathers and Mothers – yay, we’re getting an idea of how many are recruited into these studies – and yet overwhelmingly, it’s Mothers who form the majority of participants. I wonder what effect having a Dad with chronic pain might have on a kid? And it’s only recently that oh darn animal models actually include females… it’s those pesky hormones dammit!

Turning to the next most important relationship, apart from parents, there’s a good deal of research looking at partners. Again, there exists a bias towards heterosexual couples, so we’re a little biased here. There is a wealth of material to review in this area of pain, with some brilliant research designs such as repeated interviews over 18 months, followed by 22 days of repeated daily measures (eg Martire et al., 2019); investigating people with pain problems as common as knee osteoarthritis and chronic low back pain; and examining relationships between things like sleep, caregiving burden, catastrophising, relationship satisfaction, agreement about pain intensity between partners, beliefs and perceptions about pain on interactions, anger, stress. HEAPS of fascinating research to delve into.

And yet, how many clinicians, and programmes, routinely include partners? How accessible are treatment sessions for couples to attend? Who, in a pain management team consisting of largely physiotherapy plus a dollop of psychology, looks after this aspect of living with persistent pain? Waaay back in the day, like the mid-2010s, the facility I worked in had a social worker with experience in family systems and relationships – but there are few social workers working in pain management in New Zealand/Aotearoa, and unless something has changed that I don’t know about, our national insurer doesn’t recognise the value of social workers (and, for that matter, the need to include partners in therapy for chronic pain).

When I review the many studies of this part of “the social” and compare the findings from these investigations against current clinical practice, I see an enormous knowledge and skill gap. If the questions we ask people with pain about their relationship are “how is your relationship with your partner?” we’re probably going to hear “oh they’re really supportive” or “I don’t let them know how I am”. Without adequate knowledge about the kinds of factors that negatively influence the partner’s response to the person with pain we’re likely to be oblivious to the risk of partner abuse (56% of people in this study reported past partner abuse, while 29% of the respondents had been abused in the previous year – Craner et al., 2020); we might not be aware that spouses with poor sleep because their partner was sore, were more likely to be angry (Marini, et al., 2020); that 52% of partners without pain reported high-to-severe burden of having to do more both at work and home because their partner was sore (Suso-Ribera et al., 2020) – or that if a spouse without pain did not have confidence in the pain management of their partner with pain, they were more negative (Nah et al., 2020) or that when a spouse without pain thought their partner’s pain “was a mystery” they were more critical and made more invalidating responses (Burns et al., 2019).

You see, while “the social” is complex, difficult to research, and very broad – ranging from employment status, occupation, educational status, ethnicity, culture, gender, sex – it also includes the very intimate and formative relationships we have with our family. In New Zealand/Aotearoa, with our emphasis on Te Whare Tapa Whā as a model of health and for chronic pain, where relationships with whanau are vital, isn’t it time we addressed this lack?

Bowlby, J. (1978). Attachment theory and its therapeutic implications. Adolescent Psychiatry, 6, 5-33.

Brown, D. T., Claus, B. B., Konning, A., & Wager, J. (2022, Mar). Unified multifactorial model of parental factors in community-based pediatric chronic pain. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 47(2), 121-131. https://doi.org/doi: 10.1093/jpepsy/jsab085

Brown, D., Rosenthal, N., Konning, A., & Wager, J. (2021, Feb). Intergenerational transmission of chronic pain-related disability: The explanatory effects of depressive symptoms. Pain, 162(2), 653-662. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002066

Burns, J. W., Post, K. M., Smith, D. A., Porter, L. S., Buvanendran, A., Fras, A. M., & Keefe, F. J. (2019, Oct). Spouse and patient beliefs and perceptions about chronic pain: Effects on couple interactions and patient pain behavior. The Journal of Pain, 20(10), 1176-1186. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2019.04.001

Craner, J. R., Lake, E. S., Bancroft, K. E., & Hanson, K. M. (2020, Nov). Partner abuse among treatment-seeking individuals with chronic pain: Prevalence, characteristics, and association with pain-related outcomes. Pain Medicine, 21(11), 2789-2798. https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnaa126

Donnelly, T. J., Palermo, T. M., & Newton-John, T. R. O. (2020, Jul). Parent cognitive, behavioural, and affective factors and their relation to child pain and functioning in pediatric chronic pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Pain, 161(7), 1401-1419. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001833

Lee, S., Dick, B. D., Jordan, A., & McMurtry, C. (2021, Nov). Psychological interventions for parents of youth with chronic pain: A scoping review. The Clinical Journal of Pain, 37(11), 825-844. https://doi.org/10.1097/AJP.0000000000000977

Marini, C. M., Martire, L. M., Jones, D. R., Zhaoyang, R., & Buxton, O. M. (2020, Jun). Daily links between sleep and anger among spouses of chronic pain patients. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 75(5), 927-936. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gby111

Martire, L. M., Zhaoyang, R., Marini, C. M., Nah, S., & Darnall, B. D. (2019). Daily and bidirectional linkages between pain catastrophizing and spouse responses. Pain, 160(12), 2841-2847. https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001673

Meredith, P., Ownsworth, T., & Strong, J. (2008, Mar). A review of the evidence linking adult attachment theory and chronic pain: presenting a conceptual model. Clinical Psychology Review, 28(3), 407-429.

Nah, S., Martire, L. M., & Zhaoyang, R. (2020, Oct). Perceived patient pain and spousal caregivers’ negative affect: The moderating role of spouse confidence in patients’ pain management. Journal of Aging and Health, 32(9), 1282-1290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0898264320919631

Suso-Ribera, C., Yakobov, E., Carriere, J. S., & Garcia-Palacios, A. (2020, Oct). The impact of chronic pain on patients and spouses: Consequences on occupational status, distribution of household chores and care-giving burden. European Journal of Pain, 24(9), 1730-1740. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejp.1616

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (i)

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

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

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

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

Funders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biopsychological pain management is not enough

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

Nicholas declares, too:

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

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

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

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

An example might help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scopes, roles, interprofessional practice and person-centred healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask your team to meet for an hour, tops.

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

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

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

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

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

You can add some reflective questions to this activity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The added stress of chronic pain on life

For a minute, I’d like you to grab an ice-cube. If you don’t have one handy, try this at home or when you’re having your next gin and tonic. Hold onto that ice-cube. Keep holding onto it. Put a cloth underneath if it’s going to melt, but keep holding it. Now do your grocery shopping list. Or balance your accounts. While holding the ice-cube.*

Now add some exercises. Exercises you don’t care for, but feel like you have to do “because they’ll help you get better”.

Keep holding onto the ice-cube. Oh, it’s melted?! Fine – go grab another. Hand too cold to pick on up? Never mind, go find one and just do it. And keep doing the grocery shopping list. And the exercises.

Add in a night of not sleeping. Make that a week of not sleeping.

Add in having a new medication to take every day at night at the same time. The medication makes your mouth dry, constipates you, and you can’t wake up because it makes you feel sluggish.

Keep holding the ice-cube.

Phone your employer to say you’ll be in, but a therapist is going to visit you at work to see what you can do. Hold onto the ice-cube. The employer says OK but when are you coming back to work full time? I need you, or I’ll have to get someone else in.

Grab another ice-cube, keep holding it. Hand getting numb and sore? OK, therapy will help that! Here’s some mindfulness to do. And breathe…. and don’t forget the exercises. And that other appointment with a case manager to sign your rehabilitation plan. And do the groceries while you’re there. Keep holding that ice-cube.

And don’t be like that! Don’t get snippy with the kids, just pull yourself together! Hold onto the ice-cube. Lie awake worrying about work and how you’ll balance the accounts. Forget to take the medications, feel terrible – all sweaty and nauseous. Turn up to the employer with the therapist in tow. Hold on to the ice-cube.

The therapist says you can’t do this, or that, and you need to break your work up into chunks like this, and here’s a gadget that might help. Your employer rolls his eyes at you behind the back of the therapist. Keep holding that ice-cube.

Case manager phones saying she’s very sorry, but the paperwork for your weekly compensation hasn’t been filled out properly, you’ll have to go to the doctor to get another certificate, talk to your employer and have you done your exercises yet? Do you need to see a psychologist? Hold onto the ice-cube.

Your partner, who has been magnificent up until now, loses the plot when he gets home today. Hold onto the ice-cube, don’t let it drop. Feel that pain. Breathe. Do exercises. Take meds. Worry about job. Worry about relationship – partner comes to bed but turns the other way. Realise you missed getting a warrant of fitness for the car, think about putting that on the list for tomorrow.

…and someone said people on compensation for pain are just “non-copers”

Cry.

If you’re a therapist, remember what you ask a person to do is only one thing in a vast, unfamiliar and confusing sea of things to do. All the while holding on to an ice-cube that’s burning into your hand….

*Try this at home so you can experience what it might be like to have pain that’s present, intense, and gets in the way of life. BTW it’s not a treatment for chronic pain!!

Help me solve this puzzle

The IASP definition of pain is:

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

Six key notes and etymology:

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

This definition allows for “pain is always a personal experience” and that “pain and nociception are different phenomena” – supporting the idea that the association between what goes on in the tissues and our individual experience of pain is both complex, and currently unmeasurable.

So therefore, why do we have this line in the IASP diagnostic criteria for complex regional pain syndrome: “The patient has continuing pain which is disproportionate to any inciting event” – but wait, there’s more! Kosek et al, (2021) indicate that clinical criteria for nociplastic pain include “…a history of pain hypersensitivity in the region of pain” and “Evoked pain hypersensitivity phenomena can be elicited clinically in the region of pain.”
I’m puzzled.

Pain that is “disproportionate” suggests there is “proportionate” pain… AND at the same time the definition of pain says pain is “always a personal experience that is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors.” So if I experience pain in the presence of an inciting event, and report it as “OUCH” on the ouchie scale, who can tell me whether my pain is “proportionate” or “disproportionate”?

The nociplastic criteria are similarly confusing: pain hypersensitivity in the region of pain – really painful pain where I’m already experiencing pain? Or do they mean allodynia or hyperalgesia? Or…poke me where I’m sore already and the examiner can tell whether I’m more sore than I ought to be?

Underlying these diagnostic criteria lives a sneaky little beast I call “assumed normalism.” That despite all the work over the decades, some clinicians and researchers really do believe there is a reasonable relationship between nociceptive stimulation and the degree of ouch I might feel. I’m not sure about this…

I wonder if assumed normalism relies on experimental data where people volunteer to undertake nociception tests. These are things like quantitative sensory testing where individuals report the moment they experience heat, cold, pressure, and vibration (pain threshold), and when they want the experimenter to stop doing that thing NOW (pain tolerance).

Let’s think about that situation for a moment. An experimental set-up or lab. Volunteers who know what they’re going to be asked to do. Who know they can say “STOP” when they want to. Who know that no lasting harm is going to occur (ethics, don’t you know). And who volunteers for these kinds of experiments? Nuzzo (2021) pointed out that females are well-known not to volunteer for experiments where there is “an expectation of painful, unpleasant, or risky procedures” and cites research from as far back as 1976! (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1976) – and earlier (Howe, 1960).

But more than this, Horowitz (2009) states “…QST is a subjective psychophysical test entirely dependent upon patient motivation, alertness, and concentration. Patients can willingly perform poorly, and even when not doing so, there are large intra- and interindividual variations.”

How have clinical diagnostic criteria included definitions that seem too have slid by scrutiny?

Why does it matter?

As soon as we begin thinking of “normal” “objective” “proportional” or “disproportional” in leaps human judgement. Bias. The opportunity to dismiss a person’s experience – on the basis of what we can observe, or what the person can demonstrate. We can only infer that someone else is experiencing pain on the basis of their behaviour – what a person says, does, in the presence of pain, in a particular context. And bias exists when it comes to interpreting behaviour.

As a person living with pain, should I aim to “look well” and be judged as “not suffering enough for pain to be a problem”, or “look poorly and be judged as “not using coping strategies, wanting attention”…

Because, unless all the qualitative studies I’ve read are really erroneous, bias and stigmatising from clinicians and insurers is a thing. From adolescents (Wakefield, 2021), people tapering opioids (Benintendi et al., 2021), gender (yeah, I mean women, Zhang et al., 2021) – oh the list is long….

So, perhaps we could consider an alternative way to describing these kinds of pains: I personally prefer “severe” but maybe there are other words?

Benintendi, A., Kosakowski, S., Lagisetty, P., Larochelle, M., Bohnert, A. S., & Bazzi, A. R. (2021). “I felt like I had a scarlet letter”: Recurring experiences of structural stigma surrounding opioid tapers among patients with chronic, non-cancer pain. Drug and alcohol dependence, 222, 108664.

Howe, E. S. (1960). Quantitative motivational differences between volunteers and nonvolunteers for a psychological experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 44(2), 115–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/ h0045002

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

Nuzzo, J. (2021). Volunteer Bias and Female Participation in Exercise and Sports Science Research. Quest, 73(1), 82-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.2021.1875248

Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. (1976). The volunteer subject revisited. Australian Journal of Psychology, 28(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049537608255268

Wakefield, E. O., Puhl, R. M., Litt, M. D., & Zempsky, W. T. (2021). “If It Ever Really Hurts, I Try Not to Let Them Know:” The Use of Concealment as a Coping Strategy Among Adolescents With Chronic Pain. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1840.

Zhang, M., Zhang, Y., Li, Z., Hu, L., & Kong, Y. (2021). Sexism-related stigma affects pain perception. Neural plasticity, 2021.