Occupational therapists’ knowledge of pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUCH!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When it hurts – but it’s important to keep doing

To date, despite years of research and billions of dollars, there is no satisfactory way to reduce pain in all people. In fact, our pain reduction treatments for many forms of persistent pain are pretty poor whether we look at pharmaceuticals, surgery, psychological treatments or even exercise. What this means is there are a lot of disillusioned and frustrated people in our communities – yet life carries on, and people do keep doing!

In an effort to understand what might help people who don’t “find a cure”, researchers and clinicians have been looking at mediators. Mediators are factors that explain a relationship between two variables. In the study I’m examining today, the predictor is pain intensity, and the criterion variable is participating in valued life activities (the things we want or need to do). The research question was whether self-efficacy and/or pain acceptance mediated engaging in valued life activities.

Ahlstrand, Vaz, Falkmer, Thyberg and Bjork (2017) used a cross-sectional study to explore relationships between the variables above in a group of people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), drawn from three rheumatology registers in South East Sweden. Participants were required to have confirmed RA; be between 18 – 80 years; have had RA for four years or more; and have data included in the quality register – a total of 737 people agreed to take part (from a total of 1277 meeting entry criteria).

The researchers used the Swedish versions of Health Assessment Questionnaire (Wolfe, 1989) to establish degree of difficulty in daily activities, as well as the Valued Life Activities scale (Katz, Morris & Yellin, 2006); the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale (Lorig, Chastain, Ung, Shoor & Holman, 1989); and the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (Wicksell, Olsson & Melin, 2009).
The statistical analyses included Chi-square tests of independence to identify significant differences in categorical factors due to gender, and steps were taken to establish whether there were gender differences for pain acceptance, self-efficacy and valued life activities. Pearson correlations were used to explore the relationships between acceptance, self efficacy and the valued life activities summary score, and then univariate regressions were undertaken to test each individual factor (eg pain, pain acceptance and self efficacy on valued life activities). Then, only the significant contributors in univariate analyses where entered into the hierarchical linear regression models. The tests were to establish whether self-efficacy would predict valued life activities after acceptance and pain scores were considered.

Finally, structural equation modelling was used to examine the contribution and influence of pain, activity engagement and self-efficacy on difficulties performing valued life activities. A note here: The authors used the structure of the ICF model to name the constructs in their structural equation model.

What did they find?

The people who responded to this survey tended to be less active than those who were on the registers but didn’t respond, so we need to keep this in mind when we interpret their results. They found that women reported slightly more pain than men, but there were no differences between men and women on all measures except that men scored more highly on the symptom control subscale of the self-efficacy measure. A point to note here is that, unlike the Pain Self Efficacy Questionaire, this measure includes attempts to reduce or control pain and/or disability, so it’s a slightly different construct from the PSEQ which measures confidence to engage in doing things despite the pain.

In terms of pain, pain acceptance, and arthritis self-efficacy, there were low to moderate associations between these and engaging in valued life activities. In fact, all pain acceptance and self-efficacy constructs measured in this study were associated with performing valued life activities. In other words, when people are confident, and willing to do things and engage in activities despite pain, the more valued activities they actually do. In fact, one of the more striking findings was a negative relationship between activity engagement and performing valued life activities – those with lower activity engagement scores reported great difficult engaging in what was important to them (not especially surprising given that both scales are about doing what’s important and getting on with life).

Now for the really geeky model: structural equation modeling found a rather complex relationship between all the variables – so complex I’m going to include the diagram.

What does it show? Well, there’s a relationship between pain intensity and valued activity engagement – the more pain, the less people do what’s important. BUT this is mediated by “personal factors” (remember the ICF labels). These personal factors are the pain acceptance activity engagement, self-efficacy for pain and self-efficacy for symptoms. Interestingly, pain willingness, the other subscale on the pain acceptance scale, wasn’t correlated.

Or is it surprising? To my mind there are some interesting conceptual issues with this study. Firstly, in a group that is self-selected and represents slightly more disability than those who didn’t respond, it’s not surprising that pain intensity and disability were correlated. This is something we see often pre-treatment in chronic pain settings. It’s also no surprise to me that the Arthritis self-efficacy scales were associated with valued activities, and with activity engagement – the arthritis self-efficacy scales ask “How certain are you that you can decrease your pain quite a bit?”; “How certain are you that you can that you can make a small-to moderate reduction in your arthritis pain by using methods other than taking extra medication?” amongst other questions. These suggest that pain reduction is a primary aim in arthritis management. The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire, however, is a very different beast. The Activity Engagement scale is about doing things that are valued (similar to the Valued Life Activity scale), while the  Willingness scale is about being willing to live life again despite pain – for example “I am getting on with the business of living no matter what my level of pain is.”; “It’s not necessary for me to control my pain in order to handle my life well.”.

While the authors argue that this study shows the value of self efficacy, stating “Active management promotes a sense of confidence, or self-efficacy, for dealing with pain that is associated with improved participation in daily activities and wellbeing.” I think the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale’s focus on controlling pain and other symptoms is incompatible with the constructs implied in the CPAQ. The ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) approach to pain is, as I’ve mentioned many times, a focus on engaging in valued activities irrespective of pain intensity – a more achievable goal for many than becoming confident to reduce pain as the ASES measures.

To their credit, the authors also indicate that men and women who continue to experience pain despite optimal medical treatment might benefit from strategies to increase their confidence to manage their own symptoms – but that a focus on pain control instead of participation despite pain is probably unhelpful. They go on to say that “by focusing on pain aceptance and activity engagement despite pain, self-management strategies may change the focus from pain control to a more flexible engagement in valued activities.” I couldn’t agree more – and I wish they’d used the Pain Self Efficacy Questionnaire instead of the ASES in this study. Maybe we need more discussion about appropriate measures in rheumatology research.

 

Ahlstrand, I., Vaz, S., Falkmer, T., Thyberg, I., & Björk, M. (2017). Self-efficacy and pain acceptance as mediators of the relationship between pain and performance of valued life activities in women and men with rheumatoid arthritis. Clinical Rehabilitation, 31(6), 824-834. doi:10.1177/0269215516646166

Katz PP, Morris A and Yelin EH. (2006). Prevalence and predictors of disability in valued life activities among individuals with rheumatoid arthritis. Annals of Rheumatology Diseases. 65: 763–769.

Lorig K, Chastain RL, Ung E, Shoor S and Holman HR. (1989). Development and evaluation of a scale to measure perceived self-efficacy in people with arthritis. Arthritis & Rheumatism, 32(1): 37–44.

Wicksell RK, Olsson GL and Melin L. (2009). The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ)-further validation including a confirmatory factor analysis and a comparison with the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia. European Journal of Pain, 13: 760–768.

Wolfe F. (1989). A brief clinical health assessment instrument: CLINHAQ. Arthritis & Rheumatism,  32 (suppl): S9

Do pain management programmes really influence “doing” in daily life?

Disability and coping are two of the most important targets in persistent pain management, along with distress and pain intensity (the latter perhaps being the most difficult to influence). A question, however, is whether existing measures of disability truly capture the activities or occupations that people most value. For example, if house cleaning is just not my thing, even if my functioning improved over the course of a programme, would I choose to spend that new capability on vacuum-cleaning or out there in the garden?!

The Westhaven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory (MPI)(Kerns, Turk & Rudy, 1985)  is a true workhorse of pain management measurement: It’s a measure that provides, via the subscales, an estimate of the complex inter-relationships involved in pain-related disability and distress. Three profiles of coping approach have been derived from the MPI indicating “Adaptive Coping” – the person is likely to continue to improve and engage in living well if they carry on as they are; “Interpersonally Distressed” – the person is experiencing difficulties with relationships and is feeling unsupported by others around them; and “Dysfunctional” – the person is struggling with their pain, and both disability and distress can feel overwhelming.

But the disability components of the MPI don’t really indicate the kinds of activities that people might be passionate about – or those that are relevant to their lives. The items are about general activities people “typically” do – in a North American setting. I know they’ve been validated in many different populations but they still represent a general idea of activity and function rather than the unique and idiosyncratic occupations that people do. (What's the difference? An occupation is the unique way I perform the important tasks of my day - the way I dash around the house while simultaneously cleaning my teeth, getting the dogs outside, making sure the curtains are opened and the appliances off just before I head out the door! We could call this "getting ready for work" but the way I do it, and the way you do it is probably very different!)

Why is that important? Well, because people value different occupations differently, and because values drive motivation, a broad measure of disability may not capture the true value of a pain management programme. And this is why the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) (Law, Baptiste, McColl, Opzoomer, Polatajko & Pollock, 1990) is often used by occupational therapists to establish exactly what it is a person wants to be able to do. Goal Attainment Scaling is another option.

The study

In this study by Persson, Eklund, Lexell & Rivano-Fischer (2017), the aims were to assess longterm changes in MPI profiles over the course of a year; to look at associations between “Adaptive Coper” profiles at follow-up and improvements in occupational performance; and to look at factors at baseline that might be used to predict changes over time. Participants were, as usual, attending a tertiary pain management centre at a University hospital. They took part in a 21 day programme (oh the luxury of time!), and were seen by a team working together (oh the luxury of a co-located team!) including a psychologist, physician, physiotherapist, occupational therapist and social worker (oh for interprofessional teamwork!). The measures taken at pre and post were the MPI, COPM, and background demographic details.

Now here’s where the analysis gets pretty technical: dropout rates and pre-treatment differences amongst the MPI profiles were analysed using Matt-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, chi-squared and independent t-test. Cross-tabs were used to describe the distribution of the MPI profiles. McNemar’s test was used to assess changes over time on each of the four profiles, and ultimately the participants were grouped into four profiles: never AC (Adaptive coper); losing AC; gaining AC, and stable AC, and these groupings were used to analyse associations between changes in MPI profile and changes on COPM from baseline to follow-up. And this, folks, is why occupational therapists NEED to learn statistical analyses! Because they went on to use univariate and multivariate logistic regressions to see whether demographic factors would predict these profiles at follow-up, incorporating satisfaction and performance scores on COPM.

What did they find?

More participants started the programme with a profile of dsyfunctional or interpersonally distressed than adaptive coper – and at both discharge and follow-up the adaptive coping group increased to be the largest subgroup. 20% of the participants ended up in the “gaining AC” group, 11% the “stable AC” group, 6% formed the “losing AC” group, and 63% were never in the adaptive coping group at all. Not so terrific in terms of broad outcome measures, but pretty consistent with other programmes around the world.

On the more individualised outcome measure of the COPM, people in the never AC group showed least clinically relevant improvement, both the stable AC and gaining AC groups showed more improvement on occupational performance and satisfaction with performance than the never AC group, while the stable AC group improved more than the losing AC group in terms of occupational performance changes.

Long-term changes showed those who started as AC were more likely to stay that way over time, and baseline scores for occupational performance were significantly associated with being AC at follow-up – in other words, people who felt OK about what they could do in terms of occupation, tended to become more capable and less disabled over time as measured by the MPI. More importantly, those people who had higher baseline scores on occupational satisfaction were 1.3 times more likely to shift to the AC group over time. “Clinically relevant improvements on performance and satisfaction with performance at 1-year follow-up, in occupations prioritized by the participants, were associated with having an AC profile at follow-up.” (p. 6).

Confidence in doing important occupations breeds confidence in other parts of living with persistent pain.

What does this all mean anyway?

Well, importantly, people who shifted from one of the other profiles to adaptive coping over a year showed clinically relevant improvements in occupational performance and satisfaction with performance – the authors suggest these findings show improvements on and satisfaction with “doing and performing” important occupations. Not being classified into adaptive coping at any time was associated with least improvement in occupational performance and satisfaction. There is an association between “doing/performing” and “coping/adapting” that hasn’t really been studied. Perhaps starting with things people enjoy instead of beating them over the head with things they’ve never been interested in could improve pain management outcomes. Pain management programmes DO influence doing in real life – if real life doing is used as therapy!

The authors also point out that “30–47% of participants who did not show an AC profile at follow-up still showed clinically relevant improvements on occupational performance and on
satisfaction with occupational performance.” (p. 8) This suggests that the MPI coping profiles only represent one part of the outcomes that are important to individuals: occupation being the individualised daily doings that people value very highly, and pointing to the need to explore individualised outcome measurement in more studies. Given that patient-centred pain management is based on individual goals, using only generic measures is likely to give misleading outcomes about treatment efficacy.

 

Kerns IVRD,TurkDC, Rudy TE. (1985) West Haven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory (WHYMPI). Pain. 23:345–56

Law M, Baptiste S, McColl M, Opzoomer A, Polatajko H, Pollock N. (1990). The Canadian Occupational Performance Measure: an outcome measure for occupational therapy. Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy. 57(2), pp82–7.

Persson, E., Eklund, M., Lexell, J., & Rivano-Fischer, M. (2017). Psychosocial coping profiles after pain rehabilitation: Associations with occupational performance and patient characteristics. Disability and Rehabilitation: An International, Multidisciplinary Journal, 39(3), 251-260.

Thinking the worst – and willingness to do things despite pain

Catastrophising, perhaps more than any other psychological construct, has received pretty negative press from people living with pain. It’s a construct that represents a tendency to “think the worst” when experiencing pain, and I can understand why people who are in the middle of a strong pain bout might reject any idea that their minds might be playing tricks on them. It’s hard to stand back from the immediacy of “OMG that really HURTS” especially when, habitually, many people who have pain try so hard to pretend that “yes everything is really all right”. At the same time, the evidence base for the contribution that habitually “thinking the worst” has on actually increasing the report of pain intensity, increasing difficulty coping, making it harder to access effective ways around the pain, and on the impact pain has on doing important things in life is strong (Quartana, Campbell & Edwards, 2009).

What then, could counter this tendency to feel like a possum in the headlights in the face of strong pain? In the study I’m discussing today, willingness to experience pain without trying to avoid or control that experience, aka “acceptance”, is examined, along with catastrophising and measures of disability. Craner, Sperry, Koball, Morrison and Gilliam (2017) recruited 249 adults who were seeking treatment at an interdisciplinary pain rehabilitation programme (at tertiary level), and examined a range of important variables pre and post treatment.  Participants in the programme were on average 50 years old, mainly married, and white (not a term we’d ever use in New Zealand!). They’d had pain for an average of 10.5 years, and slightly less than half were using opioids at the time of entry to the programme.

Occupational therapists administered the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure, an occupational therapist-administered, semi-structured interview designed to assess a person’s performance and satisfaction with their daily activities (Law, Baptiste, McColl, Opzoomer, Polatajko & Pollock, 1990). The performance scale was used in this study, along with the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (one of my favourites – McCracken, Vowles & Eccelston, 2004); the Pain Catastrophising Scale (Sullivan, Bishop & Pivik, 1995), The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (Kroenke, Spitzer & Williams, 2001); and The Westhaven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory (Kerns, Turk & Rudy, 1985).

Now here’s where the fun begins, because there is some serious statistical analysis going on! Hierarchical multiple regression analyses is not for the faint-hearted – read the info about this approach by clicking the link. Essentially, it is a way to show if variables of your interest explain a statistically significant amount of variance in your Dependent Variable (DV) after accounting for all other variables. Or, in this study, what is the relationship between pain catastrophising, acceptance and pain severity – while controlling for age, gender, opioids use, and pain duration. The final step was to enter a calculation of the interaction between catastrophising and acceptance, and to enter this into the equation as the final step. A significant interaction suggests one of these two moderates the other – and this is ultimately captured by testing the slopes of the graphs. Complex? Yes – but a good way to analyse these complex relationships.

Results

Unsurprisingly, pain catastrophising and acceptance do correlate – negatively. What this means is that the more a person thinks the worst about their pain, the less willing they are to do things that will increase their pain, or to do things while their pain is elevated. Makes sense, on the surface, but wait there’s more!

Pain catastrophizing was significantly (ps < .01) and positively correlated with greater perceived pain intensity, pain interference, distress due to pain, and depression – and negatively correlated with occupational therapist-rated functioning. Further analysis found that only pain catastrophising (not acceptance) was associated with pain severity, while both catastrophising and acceptance predicted negative effect (mood) using the WHYMPI, but when the analysis used the PHQ-9, both pain catastrophising and pain acceptance uniquely predicted depressive symptoms.  When pain interference was used as the dependent variable, pain acceptance uniquely predicted the amount of interference participants experienced, rather than catastrophising. The final analysis was using the performance subscale of the COPM, finding that pain acceptance was a predictor, while catastrophising was not.

What does all this actually mean?

Firstly, I found it interesting that values weren’t used as part of this investigation, because when people do daily activities, they do those they place value on, for some reason. For example, if we value other people’s opinions, we’re likely to dress up a bit, do the housework and maybe bake something if we have people come to visit. This study didn’t incorporate contexts of activity – the why question. I think that’s a limitation, however, examining values is not super easy, however it’s worth keeping this limitation in mind when thinking about the results.

The results suggest that when someone is willing to do something even if it increases pain, or while pain is elevated, this has an effect on their performance, disability, the interference they experience from pain, and their mood.

The results also suggest that catastrophising, while an important predictor of pain-related outcomes, is moderated by acceptance.

My question now is – what helps someone to be willing to do things even when their pain is high? if we analyse the CPAQ items, we find things like “I am getting on with the business of living no matter what my level of pain is.”;  “It’s not necessary for me to control my pain in order to handle my life well.”; and “My life is going well, even though I have chronic pain.”. These are important areas for clinicians to address during treatment. They’re about life – rather than pain. They’re about what makes life worth living. They’re about who are you, what does your life stand for, what makes you YOU, and what can you do despite pain. And these are important aspects of pain treatment: given none of us can claim a 100% success rate for pain reduction. Life is more than the absence of pain.

 

 

Craner, J. R., Sperry, J. A., Koball, A. M., Morrison, E. J., & Gilliam, W. P. (2017). Unique contributions of acceptance and catastrophizing on chronic pain adaptation. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 24(4), 542-551.

Kerns IVRD,TurkDC, Rudy TE. (1985) West Haven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory (WHYMPI). Pain. 23:345–56.

Kroenke K, Spitzer RL, Williams JB. The PHQ-9: validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine. 16(9), 606-13.

Law M, Baptiste S, McColl M, Opzoomer A, Polatajko H, Pollock N. (1990). The Canadian Occupational Performance Measure: an outcome measure for occupational therapy. Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy. 57(2), pp82–7.

McCracken LM, Vowles KE, Eccleston C. (2004). Acceptance of chronic pain: component analysis and a revised assessment method. Pain. 107(1–2), pp159–66.

Quartana PJ, Campbell CM, Edwards RR. (2009) Pain catastrophizing: a critical review. Expert Reviews in Neurotherapy, 9, pp 745–58.

SullivanMLJ, Bishop SR, Pivik J. (1995). The Pain Catastrophizing Scale: development and validation. Psychological Assessment. 7:524–32.

Using more than exercise for pain management

In the excitement and enthusiasm for exercise as a treatment for persistent pain, I wonder sometimes whether we’ve forgotten that “doing exercise” is a reasonably modern phenomenon. In fact, it’s something we’ve really only adopted since our lifestyle has moved from a fairly physically demanding one, to one more sedentary (Park, 1994). I also wonder if we’ve forgotten that exercise is intended to promote health – so we can do the things we really want or need to do. Remembering, of course, that some people find exercise actually exacerbates their pain (Lima, Abner & Sluka, 2017), and that many folks experience pain as an integral part of their exercise (think boxing, marathon running, even going to a gym – think of the pain of seeing That Much Lycra & Sweat).

While it’s become “exercise as medicine” in modern parlance (Pedersen & Saltin, 2015; Sallis, 2009; Sperling, Sadnesara, Kim & White, 2017), I wonder what would happen if we unpacked “exercise” and investigated what it is about exercise that makes it effective by comparison with, say, activities/occupations that incorporate whole body movement?

One of the factors that’s often omitted when investigating coping strategies or treatments, especially lifestyle/self management ones, is the context and meaning people give to the activity. Context is about the when, where and how, while meaning is the why. Whether the positives (meaning, and values people place on it) outweigh the negatives (let’s face it, the lycra and sweat and huffing and puffing does not inherently appeal) are factors that enhance (or not) adherence to exercise and activity. One positive is a sense of flow, or “an optimal subjective psychological state in which people are so involved in the activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”(Csikzentmihalyi, 1990, p. 4). I can think of a few things I lose myself in – reading a good book; fishing; paddling across a lake; photography; silversmithing; gardening…

Robinson, Kennedy & Harmon (2012) examined the experiences of flow and the relationship between flow and pain intensity in a group of people living with persistent pain. Their aim was to establish whether flow was an “optimal” experience of people with chronic pain. Now the methodology they used was particularly interesting (because I am a nerd and because this is one technique for understanding daily lived experiences and the relationships between variables over time). They used electronic momentary assessment (also known as ecological momentary assessment) where participants were randomly signaled seven times a day for one week to respond to a question about flow. Computationally challenging (because 1447 measurement moments were taken – that’s a lot of data!), although not using linear hierarchical modeling (sigh), they analysed one-way between group analyses of variance (ANOVA) to explore differences in pain, concentration, self-esteem, motivation, positive affect and potency across four named states “flow, apathy, relaxation and anxiety”. We could argue about both the pre-determined states, and the analysis, but let’s begin by looking at their findings.

What did they find?

People in this study were 30 individuals with persistent pain attending a chronic pain clinic. Their ages ranged from 21 – 77 years, but mean age was 51, and there were 20 women and 10 men (remember that proportion). People had a range of pain problems, and their pain had been present for on average 68 months.

The contexts (environments) in which people were monitored were at home, or “elsewhere”, and, unsurprisingly, 71% were at home when they were asked to respond. Activities were divided into self-care, work and leisure (slightly less time in work than in leisure or self care respectively).  The purpose of the activities were necessity (35%), desire (40%), or “nothing else to do” (18%). And most people were doing these things with either alone or with family, with very small percentages with friends, colleagues or the general public.

Now we’d expect that people doing things they feel so wrapped up in that nothing else matters should experience lower pain – but no, although this was hypothesised, pain intensity scores during flow trended lower – but didn’t actually reach significance. When we add the findings that concentration, self-esteem, motivation, and potency mean scores were highest in the flow state and mean scores were lowest in the apathy and anxiety states, we can begin to wonder whether engaging in absorbing activities has a major effect on pain intensity – or whether the value placed on doing the activities is actually the most important feature for people with pain. Interestingly, people felt their flow experiences while outside the home: this happened rather less often than being in the home, where apathy was most present. So… doing something absorbing is more likely to occur away from home, while remaining at home is associated with more apathy and perhaps boredom. Finally, flow occurred in work settings more than elsewhere, suggesting yet again that work is a really important feature in the lives of all people, including people living with pain. Of course that depends on the kind of work people are doing…and the authors of this paper indicate that people with persistent pain in this study have few places in which they can do highly engaging activities, even including work.

What does this mean for exercise prescription?

Engaging people in something that holds little meaning, has little challenge and may not be in the slightest bit enjoyable is probably the best way to lose friends and have clients who are “noncompliant”. I think this study suggests that activities that provide challenge, stimulation, movement possibilities, the opportunity to demonstrate and develop skill – and that people find intrinsically lead to flow – might be another way to embrace the “movement is medicine” mantra. I wonder what would happen if we abolished “exercises” and thought about “movement opportunities”, and especially movement opportunities in which people living with pain might experience flow? I, for one, would love to see occupational therapists begin to examine flow experiences for people living with pain and embraced the creativity these experiences offer for the profession.

 

 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins.

Lima, L. V., Abner, T. S., & Sluka, K. A. (2017). Does exercise increase or decrease pain? Central mechanisms underlying these two phenomena. The Journal of physiology, 595(13), 4141-4150.

Park, R. (1994). A Decade of the Body: Researching and Writing About The History of Health, Fitness, Exercise and Sport, 1983-1993. Journal of Sport History, 21(1), 59-82. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43610596

Pedersen, B. K., & Saltin, B. (2015). Exercise as medicine–evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 25(S3), 1-72.

Robinson, K., Kennedy, N., & Harmon, D. (2012). The flow experiences of people with chronic pain. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 32(3), 104-112.

Sallis, R. E. (2009). Exercise is medicine and physicians need to prescribe it!. British journal of sports medicine, 43(1), 3-4.

Sperling, L. S., Sandesara, P. B., Kim, J. H., & White, P. D. (2017). Exercise Is Medicine. JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, 10(12).

One-session instruction in pacing doesn’t work

If there’s one form of coping strategy that occupational therapists love, it has to be the idea of “pacing”. Of course, the concept of pacing is vexed: we don’t have a good definition that’s widely accepted so it’s difficult to know whether we’re doin’ it right, but the idea of chunking down the amount of activity carried out at any one time is widely used as one way for people to sustain activity involvement despite pain and fatigue.

Today I’m looking at an old paper (from 2016) where people with osteoarthritis (hip or knee) were given instruction in time-based activity pacing by an occupational therapist. Surprisingly, this was a three-arm randomised controlled study, where 193 people were randomised into tailored activity pacing, general activity pacing, or usual care. I say surprisingly because RCT’s are fairly rare in occupational therapy research in persistent pain, and nigh on impossible to get funding for (sigh).

The definition of pacing used in this study was “the regulation of activity level and/or rate in the service of an adaptive goal or goals” (Nielson, Jensen, Karsdorp & Vlaeyen, 2013) although the form of pacing offered by clinicians working in this field is still unclear. In this study, the “tailored” group underwent seven days of monitoring using an accelerometer, the results were downloaded, analysed and an individualised pacing plan developed by the therapists. The plan was intended to highlight times when the person had high or low levels of activity (as compared with their own average, and averages drawn from previous studies of people with the same diagnosis), and to point out associations between these activity levels and self reported symptoms. Participants were then provided with ideas for changing their activity levels to optimise their ability to sustain activity and minimise symptom fluctuation.

In the “general” pacing group, participants were given the same sorts of instructions, but instead of using objective data from their own activities, they were asked to recall their past situations and symptoms, and broad guidelines were given instead. Both groups had three sessions with comparable educational material.

In the usual care group, participants were instructed to carry on with their usual approach to activity, and were assessed at baseline, 10 weeks and six months, using the same assessment process as those in the experimental arms.

Outcome measures were fatigue, measured by the Brief Fatigue Inventory (Mendoza, Wang, Cleeland, Morrissey, Johnson, Wendt & Huber, 1999); and the 8-item PROMIS fatigue short form. Pain severity was measured using the pain subscale drawn from the WOMAC. Additional measures included the 6-minute walk test; the WOMAC physical disability short form scale; the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale; the CES-D depression measure, and various demographic and disease measures (joint space narrowing, osteophyte formation etc). Finally, to determine activity pacing adherence, the pacing subscale of the Chronic Pain Coping Inventory was used (Jensen, Turner, Romano & Strom, 1995).

What did they find?

Well, you may have guessed from the title of this post: although people given the pacing intervention said they benefited, and they changed the way they carried out daily activities, the results showed that although they did so, the only significant change on measures taken was for WOMAC pain, in which the people in the general pacing group reduced their pain over the first 10 weeks. BUT participants in the usual care group reduced their pain over six months!

What does this mean?

Should we all throw out the idea of paced activities? Should occupational therapists despair and go back to the drawing board?

I don’t think so, and here’s why.

I think targeting pain intensity is possibly the wrong outcome in a study like this. We already have a vast collection of studies showing that pain intensity and disability are not well-correlated. Pain intensity alone isn’t the main reason people stop doing things when they have osteoarthritis – it’s often fear that the pain signifies “bone on bone” and “wear and tear” and “cartilage disintegration” (Hendry, Williams, Markland, Wilkinson & Maddison, 2006). And we also know that people with osteoarthritis develop their own self-management strategies and that these focus on maintaining everyday social roles and valued activities (Morden, Jinks, Bie Nio, 2011). Values seem to help people engage in demanding activities, whether the demands are because the activities hurt, or they’re physically demanding, or they’re not our favourite thing to do (think vacuum cleaning when Mum is coming to visit!) (McCracken & Keogh, 2009).

Perhaps, by drawing attention to both activities and pain intensity, the therapists in this study created a situation where pain intensity became more salient to the participants. Perhaps, too, aiming to reduce pain doesn’t take into account the other values people may hold. For example, even if I’m sore I’ll rush around cleaning if I know my parents (or other visitors) are coming to visit. My pain intensity matters less than feeling embarrassed at an untidy house.

I think we need to revisit the aims of pacing activity. To me there are several reasons for having the strategy available when/if needed:

1. If I want to work consistently at something that’s going to take a week or two to do. Example: I recently laid bricks under my cherry tree. I did this over three weekends because digging into really hard soil, heaving bags of sand, and placing the bricks is something that increases my pain quite a lot. Because I have other things to achieve over the weekend and during the week, and laying the bricks wasn’t a top priority, I chose to do about a metre square each day of each weekend.
2. If I’m aiming to do something quite demanding – like go on a two-day tramp (hike). I’ll try to build my activity tolerance over similar terrain with similar loads in advance of the actual trip.
3. If I really loathe the job and would otherwise avoid it… For example, vacuuming and mopping my floors. I’ll do a room at a time because I seriously do not enjoy housework!

Looking at activity management in isolation from what a person believes is important makes this strategy pretty unpalatable. Combine it with values, and we’re starting to see something that can be employed flexibly and when it’s workable.

 

Hendry, M., Williams, N. H., Markland, D., Wilkinson, C., & Maddison, P. (2006). Why should we exercise when our knees hurt? A qualitative study of primary care patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. Family Practice, 23(5), 558-567.

Jensen MP, Turner JA, Romano JM, Strom SE. (1995). The Chronic Pain Coping Inventory: development and preliminary validation. PAIN ;60, 203–16.

McCracken, L. M., & Keogh, E. (2009). Acceptance, mindfulness, and values-based action may counteract fear and avoidance of emotions in chronic pain: An analysis of anxiety sensitivity. The Journal of Pain, 10(4), 408-415. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2008.09.015

Mendoza TR, Wang XS, Cleeland CS, Morrissey M, Johnson BA, Wendt JK, Huber SL. (1999). The rapid assessment of fatigue severity in cancer patients: use of the Brief Fatigue Inventory. Cancer 85, 1186–96.

Murphy, S. L., Kratz, A. L., Kidwell, K., Lyden, A. K., Geisser, M. E., & Williams, D. A. (2016). Brief time-based activity pacing instruction as a singular behavioral intervention was not effective in participants with symptomatic osteoarthritis. Pain, 157(7), 1563-1573.

Morden, A., Jinks, C., & Bie Nio, O. (2011). Lay models of self-management: How do people manage knee osteoarthritis in context? Chronic Illness, 7(3), 185-200.

Nielson WR, Jensen MP, Karsdorp PA, Vlaeyen JW. (2013). Activity pacing in chronic pain: concepts, evidence, and future directions. Clinical Journal of Pain, 29, 461–8.

Persson, D., Andersson, I., & Eklund, M. (2011). Defying aches and revaluating daily doing: Occupational perspectives on adjusting to chronic pain. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 18(3), 188-197. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/11038128.2010.509810

One way of using a biopsychosocial framework in pain management – v

Theories are an important part of scientific development. Theories are essentially a collection of propositions or hypotheses that build a picture of what is in order to predict or control or somehow explain what’s going on. The extent to which a theory’s predictions represent what actually happens, given a set of circumstances, allows us to place more or less faith in the adequacy (or perhaps accuracy) of that theory. The problem with social theory is that there are so many complex interactions between variables that it’s very hard to generate hypotheses that represent what actually goes on in the world – so we end up with skinny theory that explains very little, and in turn this allows naysayers to argue “oh but it isn’t so”.

A biopsychosocial framework is one of those messy, complex theoretical models of “the way people are” that beg for people to argue against it. “It’s too complex”, “it’s too broad”, “it’s too reductionist”, “it’s not clinically useful” – all points against this way of viewing people. Yet, after years of using this model, I still find myself unable to find an alternative way of attempting to understand my two clinical questions: why is this person presenting in this way at this time (and what is maintaining their situation), and what can be done to reduce distress and disability?

Social theories are not something many health professionals are introduced to during their undergraduate training. We’re not trained to understand topics like structure of societies, organisations, groups and everyday lives and how they come about. We don’t typically get trained to think about power and who defines what is normal and abnormal, or who generates names for things – classifications, taxonomies, diagnoses. We rarely get to unpack the hidden discourse of who holds power in healthcare delivery, policy development – even social spending on health.

The people I typically see, living with persistent pain, are often from what posh folks call “the wrong side of the tracks”. Many people don’t have good employment histories. They may not have savings, they may live off a benefit. They are often not well-educated, having left school to do manual work. Their daily routines might be chaotic, and the idea of “keeping fit” or “eating well” doesn’t occur to them because their lives are about getting through the day, loving the family they have, and maybe looking towards a tomorrow where things might be different.

In pain management, we’ve not really spent much time examining the kinds of social relationships or social structures in which the people who really struggle with managing pain come from.  I’m not sure I’ve read very much research exploring, for example, whether people who have two jobs and live on a minimum wage experience greater difficulty developing skills in pacing their activities. I’ve not heard much from the people who live in this way expressing their understanding of what contributes to their distress and disability. I don’t see much about how uncertainty of employment pushes people into unsuitable work – while work is good for most people, what about those minimum wage jobs with unsavoury work environments, precarious employment tenure, cold, wet, smelly and physically demanding jobs with little prospect for the future? I don’t see very much about the effect of someone living on the bare bones of their threadbare trews going to see a medical specialist dressed immaculately in a bespoke suit and silk tie, with the handmade shoes and a language of healthcare that is incomprehensible to anyone other than another similarly clad specialist.

For a sociopsychobiological model of pain (yes, that’s a word, and no I haven’t got it backwards – see this) to gain traction, I think it’s timely to ponder the way our communities view persistent pain. Communities include our own healthcare communities – the manual therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing, medical enclaves that use special language and dress in certain ways to demonstrate that we know our stuff. And we need to take a minute to understand the communities the people we hope to help come from.

At the stroke of a keyboard, the labels we give to someone – fibromyalgia, “degenerative changes”, “pre-existing condition”, “depression” – alter the treatment that person receives within healthcare. No question about it – if a person is receiving accident compensation (in NZ it’s ACC) and someone gives that kind of label to them, they’re going to the bottom of the health queue. The vagaries of our system mean that person doesn’t receive work-related rehab, they’re disentitled from ACC, no more weekly compensation, and oh yes they now go through the dehumanising process of attending the “Ministry for Social Development”.

I’m not arguing against the way our ACC legislation is written. And I’m not certain that receiving compensation is always a good thing. What I am pointing out is that when health professionals view the person in front of them as “other” – beneficiary, ACC claimant, pain patient – we are issuing a social declaration. And that means we’re exerting a degree of power over them and their lives. The labels we give have power. And this has a significant impact on the way that person views their pain, and the treatment they may receive.

I think until we begin to include, extend, and invite people living with pain to co-investigate their experience and to contribute to our health professional education (including scientific meetings), we’ll carry on thinking of ourselves as somehow superior to, and certainly more powerful than, the people we hope to treat. Hats off to Rajam Roose for developing the San Diego Pain Summit where this year she’s included a patient panel to give an insight into what it means to hear “your pain is just an output of your brain”. Can we have more please.

What can we do to reduce distress and disability? One thing we can do is begin a conversation about persistent pain being something that anyone can experience. It’s just that people without resources end up dealing with not only pain but also lack of power to change the way it’s treated.

One way of using a biopsychosocial framework in pain management – iv

And yes! There’s more to this series of posts on how I use a biopsychosocial model in practice!

Today’s post is about moving from a conceptual model to a practical model, or how we can use research in our clinical reasoning.

A biopsychosocial model (BPSM) as envisaged by Engel was a framework for clinicians to think about why this person is presenting in this way at this time (and what may be maintaining their situation), as well as what could be done to reduce distress and disability. Engel wanted clinicians to go beyond disease processes, isolated from the people experiencing them, and to explore aspects of how the person coped with everyday challenges (including health), the factors that influenced their decision that their health problem was indeed a problem, and the context of seeking healthcare.  He wanted clinicians to be scientific about how they generated hypotheses which could then be tested in clinical practice, and ultimately confirm or disconfirm the contribution of that factor.

The “bio” aspect of pain (which is a contentious word – I’ll comment in a bit) involves disease processes, trauma, all the biological aspects prior to conscious awareness of the “ouch” we know as pain. Theoretical developments in this area include all the work being conducted in terms of understanding anatomy and physiology of the human body, from molecular study (information transmission from one neurone to another); detailed understanding of spinal cord mechanisms; of the role of glia; of inflammatory processes; of genetic and epigenetic changes; of relationships between blood flow to and from various parts of the brain; of biomechanics; of normal healing processes – and so on. There’s no lack of information being generated by researchers undertaking basic science about the biological mechanisms involved in our experience of pain. Because I typically see people with persistent pain that has been present for maybe 12 months or more (usually much longer than that), I rely on the work of my colleagues to make a good diagnosis. Most people have had more investigation than is probably helpful for them, and I think we can use Clifford Woolf’s broad mechanisms as a reasonable stance when considering an underlying mechanism involved in a person’s pain. Essentially he identifies four main mechanisms: nociceptive, inflammatory, neuropathic and what is now known as “nociplastic” (where the nociceptive system appears to have a problem with processing information).

Yes, we can argue that our current state of understanding is incomplete and there is more to learn, but by working from these basic mechanisms I think we can begin to work on the “bio” part of a biopsychosocial model with a degree of confidence. For my work, anyway, these mechanisms seem to provide a reasonable framework from which the “bio” part of management can begin.

But this is where many clinicians start – and stop. Directly treating, for example, inflammation, certainly provides a reduction in pain – for example, my partner who takes Humera for his ankylosing spondylitis. He no longer experiences inflammatory pain and as his CRP levels reduced, so too did his pain. We can see similar effects when someone has a grotty old hip joint replaced, which removes nociceptive input, ultimately leaving them with a shiny new and painfree hip (in most cases). But as my partner found out, having no pain doesn’t immediately change old habits.

His situation is a nice illustration of the interaction between a disease process which responded really well to a drug that eliminates inflammation, and his beliefs and behaviour which wasn’t changed. Let me explain – once his drug kicked in and he had no pain, he found it odd not to have to think about his pain when climbing hills. It took him about a month or two to fully return to hill climbing in the way he’d done before his anky spond started. That’s right – no pain for a month or two, but that long before he felt confident to go about his activities. And he’s not a man who worries much about his pain!

To add some theory to this, his beliefs (that if he climbed hills a full speed he would inevitably end up with a very sore back) led to him having learned not to go a full pace (through both classical and operant conditioning). We could call this “pain-related fear and avoidance” – or “fear avoidance”. This is one theory that has been extensively researched, and we can integrate the hypotheses generated from this theory into our understanding of why my partner initially had some hesitation about climbing hills. Flowing on from this, we can consider treatments that have been found useful to address his hesitation.

The first treatment could be “explaining pain” to him. Now that wasn’t useful in this case because – oh yeah – his pain had gone! And although he knew his inflammatory pain wasn’t going to harm him (otherwise he’d never have been a high country fire fighter for 20 years despite his anky spond!), he didn’t like the after-effects of aggravating his pain. What helped was addressing his anxiety about the potential for a big flare-up – and this was primarily about beginning at a level that was just beyond his “normal” hill climb, and gradually progressing.

This superficially looks like “exercise” – but it’s exercise with a twist. My partner is as fit as a buck rat. His cardiovascular fitness was fine. Gradually increasing his hill walking wasn’t about increasing fitness – it was about helping him approach an activity that he was a tad concerned might flare his pain up, leading to a rotten night’s sleep (as it had in the past). In fact, this “treatment” was almost all about reducing avoidance by exposing him to things that increased his anxiety just a bit – enough for him to establish that the rotten sleep consequence didn’t happen.

So a biopsychosocial approach to his recovery involved the biological which quickly resolved his pain but left him with some concerns (reasonable ones I think) about pushing himself too hard. Addressing those concerns by taking a theory developed originally from phobia research, applying it to his situation and developing a treatment based on this theory, has led to his return to full participation. Using research-based information to address another part of “why is this person presenting in this way at this time, and what might be maintaining this situation” involves thinking beyond the disease process, and into understanding the problems the person identifies. It means thinking beyond a single discipline. It means reading widely and thinking creatively. That was a good part of Engel’s original proposition.

 

One way of using a biopsychosocial framework in pain management – ii

Last week I discussed case formulation as one way of using a biopsychosocial framework in pain management, and I reviewed Benedetti’s description of the process of becoming aware that something’s wrong, seeking relief from that discomfort, then the “meet the therapist moment”, and finally the “receiving the therapy” steps along the way. Benedetti considers this within a neurobiological model (Benedetti, 2013), while Engel (1977) used general systems theory to frame his critique of the original biomedical model.

This week I want to look at a behavioural model. I do this partly because I think it’s been a long time since this model was brought into our discussions about pain and pain behaviour, and I do it because I think we can understand a great deal about why different people respond differently to their pain when we look at behaviour alone – before we even begin to look at beliefs or attitudes about pain.

Let’s do a little revision (Psych 101). In a behavioural model, we’re looking at two main forms of conditioning: Pavlovian or classical conditioning, and operant or instrumental conditioning. In the case of pain, we also need to revisit the distinction made between the experience (pain), and our behavioural response to that experience (pain behaviours). Pain behaviours are typically filtered or influenced by what we think is going on (judgements about the meaning of pain – eg super-scary crumbling back, or I just did too much gardening), what we’ve learned to do, and the context in which we’re experiencing pain. That context can be current (eg I’m in Church and it’s very quiet so I’d better not swear as I hit my toe against the pew!), or past (eg last time I kicked my toe against the pew and swore, everyone looked at me – how embarrassing!), or even future (eg if I swear when I kick my toe against the pew, I’ll never be able to show my face here again!). It’s the learned part I want to discuss today.

Pain behaviours range from reflex withdrawal responses (lifting the foot up while straightening the other leg to support me when I stand on a tack), to quite complex behaviours we’ve learned are relevant in our environment (filling out a claim form for compensation and treatment).

We probably developed pain behaviours as part of our evolutionary development: the reflex withdrawal behaviours don’t require conscious thought, so they begin in infancy (actually, before), and rely on spinal mechanisms (eg Rohrbach, Zeiter, Andersen, Wieling & Spadavecchia, 2014), with various parts of the brain becoming involved as part of strategies to avoid threat (see Damasio and Damasio (2016) for some insights into evolutionary aspects of withdrawal reflex). But because we have a developed cortex, we’ve learned ways of suppressing our responses, depending on social context – and on responses from others around us.

Reflexive responses are those associated with classical conditioning – and lead us to learn relationships between previously non-threatening stimuli and both withdrawal responses and the physiological arousal that goes with them. For example, if I bend over to make the bed and OUCH! my back suddenly gets really sore. I straighten up very carefully – and I’ve learned something: next time I bend over to make the bed, I’ll be remembering and preparing for that OUCH! to happen once again. The bed and bending forward movement become associated, in my mind, with that OUCH! Of course, for most of us, once we make the bed a few more times (make that many times), we’ll learn that OUCH! doesn’t inevitably follow the bend, so we gain confidence to repeat that movement without preparing for the OUCH! Now what do you think might happen if I never had an opportunity to make the bed again? Say, if I have a really protective person in my life who stopped me every time I go to do it – will that association I have in my mind persist, or will it reduce? This is, in essence, what is thought to happen when someone develops so-called “fear avoidance”. Note: the experience of pain does not have to re-occur for me to avoid bending and begin to rev my nervous system up. What needs to happen is for the first instance to be pretty strong, and for me to not test my belief again. It’s the behaviour that persists (avoidance) because by avoiding something I believe will be OUCH! I avoid experiencing OUCH! And by avoiding that experience, I never test whether OUCH! happens every time, or just that once.

Let’s look at the other really powerful learning mechanism: operant conditioning. In this situation, the likelihood of me repeating my behaviour is increased or reduced, depending on responses in the environment. So, let’s take my bending forward and experiencing OUCH! If my partner (bless him) then decided to fuss over me, make me a cup of tea and tell me not to worry about making the bed ever again – AND if I liked that idea – my response is likely to be to avoid making the bed. I might even go as far as wincing a bit when walking, so he makes me another cup of tea and fusses over me. I might talk about my back pain because he’s so concerned about me (or I really want him to be concerned about me) and if he carries on fussing, I’m likely to carry on with these behaviours. Now picture that in a two-year-old kid – every time the kid trips and cries, some concerned parent comes picks him up, something the kid likes, it’s probable that kid will learn that this is normal, and something to do when he hurts. For more on learning theory, Johan Vlaeyen summarises the state of play in a review paper from 2015 (Vlaeyen, 2015).

We’re smart, us humans. We learn to predict and remember patterns even from imprecise data – it doesn’t take much for us to put two and two together, particularly when it’s something relevant to surviving! Whenever I’m listening to someone telling me their story about why they’re presenting in this way at this time, and what is maintaining their situation, I keep thinking about the various learning mechanisms involved. Social context and the people around us and how they respond to us exert a powerful force on what we do – and many times we’re not even aware of why we do what we do.  Knowing this stuff means that when I’m listening to someone’s story I try very hard to factor in those things that may have influenced what the person does, rather than just thinking the person is aware of doing all they are doing.

 

Benedetti, F. (2013). Placebo and the new physiology of the doctor-patient relationship. Physiological Reviews, 93(3), 1207-1246. doi:10.1152/physrev.00043.2012

Damasio, A., & Damasio, H. (2016). Pain and other feelings in humans and animals. Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling, 1(3), 33.

Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129-136.

Rohrbach, H., Zeiter, S., Andersen, O. K., Wieling, R., & Spadavecchia, C. (2014). Quantitative assessment of the nociceptive withdrawal reflex in healthy, non-medicated experimental sheep. Physiology & behavior, 129, 181-185.

Vlaeyen, J. W. (2015). Learning to predict and control harmful events: Chronic pain and conditioning. Pain, 156, S86-S93.

Minding your body: Interoceptive awareness, mindfulness and living well

We all grow up with a pretty good idea of what our body feels like; what normal is. It’s one of the first “tasks” of infancy, it seems, to work out what is me and what is not. When people experience a disturbance to the way their body moves or feels, it can take some time to get used to that new way of being. In pregnancy, where the body takes on a different shape and dimension, it’s not uncommon to bump into things because the new shape hasn’t yet sunk in!

This awareness of “what my body feels like” is called interoceptive awareness (IA), and I was intrigued to read this paper by Hanley, Mehling and Garland (2017) in which IA is examined in relation to dispositional mindfulness (DM). DM is thought to be the innate tendency to notice without judging or automatically reacting to what is going on. IA may be extremely sensitive in some people – for example, people with health anxiety might notice their sweaty palms and heart palpitations and then worry that they’re about to have a heart attack, or the same symptoms in someone with social anxiety might be experienced as indications to LEAVE RIGHT NOW because EVERYONE is looking at ME.

I’m not sure of research into IA in people with persistent pain, although I am positive it’s something that has been studied (see Mehling, Daubenmier, Price, Acree, Bartmess & Stewart, 2013). As a result, in my conclusions I’m going to draw from my experience working with those living with persistent pain, and extrapolate wildly!

This study aimed to establish the relationship between various items on two questionnaires used to measure IA and DM: the MAIA (Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness), and the FFMQ (Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire). The paper itself discusses the first measure as empirically derived and confirmed by focus groups, and having associations with less trait anxiety, emotional susceptibility and depression – in other words, high scores on this measure (awareness of body sensations and judging those sensations) are associated with important factors influencing our wellbeing. The second measure is described as “one of the most commonly used self-report measures of DM”. It consists of five scales thought to measure important aspects of mindfulness (observing, not reacting and acting with awareness).

Along with these two measures, the authors examined wellbeing, which essentially was defined as a tendency to accept oneself, have a purpose, manage the environment, develop good relationships, continue to grow as a person and be independent and autonomous. We could probably argue about these dimensions in view of what may be a cultural component (autonomy may not be highly favoured in some communities).

Recruitment was via mTurk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing website. As a result participants possibly don’t represent the kinds of people I would see in clinical practice. And half of the 478 participants were excluded because people didn’t complete all the questionnaires. I could quibble about this sample, so bear that in mind when you consider the results.

Results

Turning to the results, the first finding was a good correlation between all three questionnaires, with the FFMQ more strongly correlated with psychological wellbeing than the MAIA. But these researchers wanted more! So they carried out canonical correlation analysis, which is used to correlate the latent variables present in measurement instruments. It’s complicated, but what it can tell us is how underlying aspects of two unrelated measures might fit together. In this instance, the researchers found that two of the FFMQ (non-reacting and observing) were related to six of the eight MAIA factors (attention regulation, self-regulation, trusting, emotional awareness, body listening and noticing). They also found that FFMQ ‘non-judging’ and ‘acting with awareness’ were associated with MAIA ‘not worrying’ subscale.

What does this tell us? Well, to me it’s about grouping somewhat-related items together from two instruments to work out their contribution to something else. The authors thought so too, and therefore completed a further analysis (told you it was complicated!), to look at a two-step hierarchical multiple regression where the two sets of scales were entered into equations to see how much each contributed to the psychological wellbeing score. Whew!

What they found was interesting, and why I’m fascinated by this study despite its shortcomings.

What can we do with this info?

Being mindfully observant and non-reactive seems to be associated with a person’s ability to notice and control attention to what’s going on in the body. Makes sense to me – knowing what goes on in your body but being able to flexibly decide how much to be bothered about, and what you’re going to do about those sensations will make a difference to how well you can cope with things like fatigue, hunger, the need to change body position or to sustain a position when you’re focusing on something else – like hunting!

Apparently, being able to attend to body sensations is also part of regulating your emotional state, and if you can do this, you’ll generally experience your body as a safe and “trustworthy” place. And if you can do this when your body doesn’t feel so good yet still remain calm and accepting, this is a good thing. In the final analysis, these authors called the first cluster of statements “Regulatory awareness” – being aware of your body and regulating how you respond to it. The second cluster related more with non-judging and acting with awareness, so the authors called this “Acceptance in action”.

For people living with persistent pain, where the body often does not feel trustworthy and there’s an increased need to “ignore” or “let go” or “not judge” painful areas, it seems that one of the most important skills to learn is how to self regulate responses to IA. To take the time to notice all the body (not ignore the sore bits, nor obsess about the sore bits). This doesn’t come easily because I think for most of us, we’ve learned we need to notice pain – after all, ordinarily it’s helpful! The second part is to accept in action – in other words discriminating between unpleasant body sensations are should be worried about, and those not needing our attention is an adaptive skill. Perhaps mindfulness gives us better capabilities to discriminate between what needs to be taken into account, and what does not.

Interestingly, the least strongly associated response items were related to using words to describe what goes on in the body. For me this suggests experiential practices might be more useful to help people develop these two skills than simply talking about it. And suggests that maybe we could use meditative movement practices as a good way to develop these skills.

R.A. Baer, G.T. Smith, J. Hopkins, J. Krietemeyer, L. Toney, (2006) Using self-report assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness, Assessment 13 27–45.

Hanley, A. W., Mehling, W. E., & Garland, E. L. (2017). Holding the body in mind: Interoceptive awareness, dispositional mindfulness and psychological well-being. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 99, 13-20. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2017.05.014

W.E. Mehling, J. Daubenmier, C.J. Price, M. Acree, E. Bartmess, A.L. Stewart, (2013). Self-reported interoceptive awareness in primary care patients with past or current low back pain, Journal of Pain Research. 6

W.E. Mehling, C. Price, J.J. Daubenmier, M. Acree, E. Bartmess, A. Stewart, (2012) The multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness (MAIA), PLoS One 7  e48230.