Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (ii)

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)

After the heartbreaking post last week that seemed to resonate with so many around the world, 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

Why healthcare keeps losing good clinicians (or, why I walked away for a second time)

Guest post written by a wonderful PT who has walked away from the profession.

Why healthcare keeps losing good clinicians (or, why I walked away for a second time)

Firstly, I don’t know if the above statement is true. I just know a lot of good people who’ve left healthcare, across many different professions. And I highly recommend reading “This is going to Hurt” by Adam Kay, or if you don’t have the attention span, it’s now a TV series in 25 minute bites.

Last week I resigned from my position as a Physiotherapist and Keyworker, working for a supplier on the ACC pain contract and other physical injury contracts such as concussion. I’ve been working in that role for 3 years since moving to New Zealand, and for the most part, I’ve loved it. I get to make a real difference in people’s lives and see them get some quality of life back, for instance, being able to spend more time with family, or return to valued activities. I had a flexible work schedule, an okay salary, and a company car and fuel card.

Yet, I’m seriously looking at leaving healthcare for good, and searching for pathways to a new career. I don’t know if I can do healthcare again.

So why did I resign? Here goes…

It’s a lonely profession. Technically, I work as part of an “inter-disciplinary team” (IDT) of clinicians of different professions (PT, OT, Psychologists, Social Workers, Speech Therapists, and a Doctor or two), supported by an office. In reality, I hardly, if ever, see any of them. Very occasionally we might be able to tee up a joint session with a client (maybe one a month). Sometimes phone calls, though there’s a lot of missed calls and messages. The majority of our IDT “meetings” happen over email, where replies tend to drift in over the course of several weeks (often long after they are needed) as colleagues work their way through their inboxes. And don’t even get me started about trying to get anything out of our overworked office staff. So, I work as part of a diverse team, and yet, I basically work by myself for 98% of it.

As well as lonely, it’s emotionally draining. Like, having your soul sucked out through your nostrils kind of draining. Yep, there’s the occasional lovely little old lady who makes your day, but for the most part these are long term (that’s what chronic means), broken and tormented souls who take a lot more from you than you give back. As a result, despite being a Physiotherapist, I’m actually an underpaid, undertrained counsellor who is having to play listener, motivator, advocate and a number of other roles to these people. While working out what the actual hell is going on with them and what I’m going to do next. It’s tiring.  

I do (did) a LOT of driving. I was told the other the day that I cover an area of rural New Zealand the size of Belgium. I’m not sure if that’s true, but regardless, I would often spend up to 5 or 6 or 7 hours a day in the car, often to only see 2 or 3 or maybe 4 clients. In my effort to try and be as efficient as possible, this would involve me stringing several nearby(ish) towns together, resulting in 11-12 hour days. The roads I drive are often narrow, rough, hilly, windy, icy, and sometimes covered in cow sh#t (which is sometimes frozen). Once I had to change a flat tyre at dusk parked in a ditch on the side of a major highway barely inches from traffic because the nearest decent shoulder was around 10km away (I know those roads well), and then drive the next 75km home at 80km/h on the space-saving spare. Fatigue, anyone?

Promotion or pay rise, anyone? Not in healthcare. I’m a Physiotherapist, and once I’ve (or my employer has) paid for the right to work (registration, insurance, practicing certificate, continuing education expenses), I get billed out at a rate that is set by ACC. It doesn’t matter if you have four postgraduate degrees, 40 year’s experience, have personally mobilised the Queen’s patella, or are a new graduate with no real idea what the f&#% you’re meant to be doing, that rate is the same. Because, well, it’s “Physiotherapy” right? So that’s why, after 15 years in the game, a Master’s degree and having started more postgraduate study, I’m making less money per year than I was in 2011 (take inflation into account and the picture is even worse). And if I stay working in a clinical role (ie seeing patients) that’s unlikely to change. Many people think that Physios are well paid but compared to the university entrance score and study required and hoops we have to continually jump through just to put some silly coloured tape on you, our pay is lower than most other white collar (and many blue collar) professions that need far less training or navigation of red tape.

There is basically no oversight, or supervision of anyone’s work, so to an extent you can just do what you want. This sounds great, but actually, you spend your entire day questioning whether you are doing a good job or not? It’s up to you entirely to seek feedback from colleagues, mentors or external supervisors, but in reality you can just do whatever you want (or what you believe is right). I’m extremely lucky to have a group of dynamic and clever people as a network to draw upon and tell me I’m being an idiot when I am (and they will).

Which is how I ended up being “bullied” by a colleague. I’m not sure that “bullied” is the right word and I still feel a little silly saying it, though that’s how it felt to me. For a long period (over a year), working with this person has given me significant anxiety, which on reflection, has probably made the situation worse in how I’ve responded to them. But in my defence, and I’m going to say this outright (because if I’ve resigned, then hey, I can), the problem with having little real supervision in our world is that clinicians start to develop and hold on biases, for example “this is how we’ve/I’ve always done things” and then start to believe that that’s how it should be done by everyone, all, the time. And then, let’s say, a colleague does something that said clinician doesn’t think is the right way to do things (according to their bias). End result: they call you up and give you a telling off, pushing you to the point of a panic attack on the side of the highway at the start of another 12 hour day, and then get annoyed and demand an apology because you didn’t agree with them then and there.

Margins are tight in health care. Like you hear about in the news, healthcare budgets are always stretched, whether it’s ACC or the DHBs. Which means that either you’re being pushed towards crazy KPI’s (which thankfully I wasn’t), or like I alluded to earlier, the office ends up understaffed and management (what there is of it) is seriously stretched. And those in management positions are often undertrained when it comes to actually managing stuff. So this is how, after reporting the above bullying issue, it got filed away in the “too hard” drawer for four months before being “dealt with” in a rushed manner on the end of other work meetings in a public café. Suffice to say, that didn’t go so well, I had a major episode of anxiety and ended up at my GP’s office, and haven’t worked since.

So here I am, a healthcare professional in his early 40s, with 15 years’ experience and specific expertise and interest in working in chronic pain, and I’m ready to walk away and find a new career. I’m sick of being lonely, underpaid, and under supported at work. It’s time we start to value healthcare, and the people working in it, and provide safe, supportive and fairly paid working environments for them.

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.

The demise of practical pain management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem/s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The complex world of identifying nociplastic pains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean for us as clinicians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women, partner violence and pain

As the potential for greater repression of women’s autonomy grows (Afghanistan, United States, Mexico), along with racist and misogynist statements from business leaders (DGL CEO Simon Henry) it’s timely to look at pain in women. We already know that more women than men present with persistent pain (Blyth, n.d.), while women who are seen for their pain are more often misdiagnosed, offered psychiatric medication or psychological intervention only and have their experiences dismissed as “hysterical, fabricated, or nonexistent” (Samulowitz, et al., 2018). My daughter, when attending Emergency Department was offered a paracetamol and told “there’s no cure for being a woman” when seeking help for an ovarian cyst. Period pain is considered “normal” (Drabble et al., 2021). Pain in women is not a sexy topic.

Intimate partner violence is common among women. 27% of women who have had a partner report violence perpetrated against them. 24% of young women aged between 15 – 19 years report violence. Low-income countries reporting higher levels of intimate partner violence, and while data was not available for the past two years of covid-19 disruption, it’s expected that higher levels of violence are probable (Sardinha et al., 2022).

What about the intersection between partner violence and persistent pain? (BTW violence is defined as emotional, physical, or sexual harm experienced in a current or former intimate relationship and includes stalking, psychological aggression such as coercion, as well as physical and sexual violence).

Persistent pain is one of the most commonly reported health consequences of intimate partner violence (Walker, 2022), and women are more likely to be the recipients of partner abuse than men. Yet – open conversations about violence and persistent pain in women, recognising the signs and symptoms of partner violence in people seeking help for persistent pain, and adequate approaches to treatment are rare. Women may not disclose their situation for fear of being stigmatised, labelled unfairly, or having their pain – and their situation – trivialised.

Walker and colleagues (2022) carried out a systematic review of studies exploring the types of pain women experienced in association with partner violence, the severity of that pain, and the impact of pain on the person. They found that while pelvic pain was common amongst women who had been sexually abused, women also reported chest pain, back pain, neck pain, arthritis, and stiffness in joint or muscles, more frequent headaches, and more back pain – furthermore, women who had experienced partner violence reports higher pain severity, with 75% of women indicating moderate to severe pain, and the longer a women had been in an abusive relationship, the more likely they were to report higher intensity pain.

Interestingly, disability from persistent pain wasn’t measured often – only two studies from 12 included in the final review – but women with persistent pain from partner violence reported higher pain-related disability. They also reported worse impact on their mental health – more PTSD, anxiety and depression, with depression being one of the key mediator between a history of partner violence and ongoing pain.

The authors of this study (Walker et al., 2022) point out that it’s likely that women who have sustained partner violence and experience persistent pain are “not being adequately identified and responded to in clinical settings” – and that the fear of not being believed and the stigma of being on the receiving end of partner violence likely limits how many women openly discuss their situation.

Isn’t it time to get women’s pain prioritised? To get political about systems and processes that fail women? Isn’t it time to shift the narrative around women’s menstrual pain? To acknowledge that women are not mini men?

Finally, when we consider pain rehabilitation, we need to not only recognise that women have different priorities and goals for their lives than men, we also need to understand that doing rehabilitation is more complex for women than men – women report more difficulty prioritising their own rehabilitation over other responsibilities in their life (Côté & Coutu, 2010). Women may not even be referred for rehabilitation as often as men (Stålnacke et al., 2015). It’s time to prioritise understanding the lived experience of women as they pursue help for their persistent pain – and then do something different.

Blyth, F. (n.d.). Chronic pain in Australia: A prevalence study. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/11166468

Daniel Côté & Marie-France Coutu(2010)A critical review of gender issues in understanding prolonged disability related to musculoskeletal pain: how are they relevant to rehabilitation?,Disability and Rehabilitation,32:2,87-102,DOI: 10.3109/09638280903026572

Drabble, S. J., Long, J., Alele, B., & O’Cathain, A. (2021). Constellations of pain: a qualitative study of the complexity of women’s endometriosis-related pain. British Journal of Pain, 15(3), 345-356.

Samulowitz, A., Gremyr, I., Eriksson, E., & Hensing, G. (2018). “Brave Men” and “Emotional Women”: A theory-guided literature review on gender bias in health care and gendered norms towards patients with chronic pain. Pain Research & Management, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6358624

Sardinha, L., Maheu-Giroux, M., Stöckl, H., Meyer, S. R., & García-Moreno, C. (2022). Global, regional, and national prevalence estimates of physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner violence against women in 2018. The Lancet, 399(10327), 803-813.

Stålnacke, B., Haukenes, I., Lehti, A., Wiklund, A., Wiklund, M. et al. (2015)
Is there a gender bias in recommendations for further rehabilitation in primary care of patients
with chronic pain after an interdisciplinary team assessment?.
Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 47(4): 365-371
http://dx.doi.org/10.2340/16501977-1936

Walker, N., Beek, K., Chen, H., Shang, J., Stevenson, S., Williams, K., Herzog, H., Ahmed, J., & Cullen, P. (2022). The Experiences of Persistent Pain Among Women With a History of Intimate Partner Violence: A Systematic Review. Trauma Violence Abuse, 23(2), 490-505. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838020957989