How are you going with your resolutions?

It’s seven days into the new year, and if you’ve made New Year’s resolutions I’d like to bet that it’s around now that your resolve is starting to fade… Don’t worry, I’m not going to nag! I am going to point out just how difficult it is to stick with a resolution, goal, action, new habit – whatever you call it.

And take a moment, if you’re a health professional. Just stop for a moment and think about the resolution, goal, action, new habit you’ve just set with your last patient. What are the chances that person will stick with that goal for the week?

Add in the complexities of, perhaps, competing goals or actions set by other clinicians seeing that person concurrently. The thought records, or mindfulness practice, or the planning and prioritising and pacing. Add in the usual daily life activities that need doing: the washing, cooking, shopping for groceries, paying the bills, filling the car with gas, spending time with family (not just any old time, but quality time). And work. And remembering to take medications (even the ones that make you feel drowsy or nauseous).

And not sleeping, finding it hard to rest because pain gets in the way.

And guilt perhaps because why is this person not getting better?

Is it any wonder that the people we try to help seem “unmotivated”? Or that they appear not to be “adherent”?

I keep coming back to something that bothers me about our attitudes towards the people we try to help. There continues to be a sense of “them” and “us”, with “us” being all that is good, proper and right, and “them” being, because we’re humans who like dichotomies, the opposite. After all “they” are seeking help from “us” which automatically puts “us” in the authoritative position.

Now before I get harangued by people saying “oh but not me”, I wonder what it would be like to record yourself in conversation with your colleagues. You know the time at your breaks where you meet around the water cooler or the coffee pot, and you do a mutual moan about work. Check in with your discussion: how do you refer to the struggles of the people you see? Is there a chance, even inadvertently, to use a “should” or “must” word or two? Do you ever think not just about the things you do with the person you’re working with, but the things other clinicians are also doing?

Enough finger pointing. What can we do to (a) shift our own attitudes and (b) help the people we see stick to the things we hope will help them?

Attitude shifts

It’s a tough one. Shifting an attitude is difficult, in part because we don’t recognise we hold attitudes because they seem “normal” or commonplace – and the more ingrained or deep-seated they are, the more difficult it is for us to see them. Attitudes are complex – possibly partly based on memory and partly generated in the moment-in-time (Albarracin & Shavitt, 2018). They also change with difficulty – being in contact with “others”, for example, has been shown to influence attitudes positively, while even imagining positive contact showed about 14% of participants were more likely to explicitly state positive attitudes (Miles & Crisp, 2014). Overall, changes in attitudes based on an intervention or a message seems to have a small effect (d = 0.22) – but these seem to be quite durable changes.

But something affect our attitudes: if we argue for our beliefs, we’re likely to become more stuck in our original beliefs, we add new information to our explanations but don’t readily throw out old information. To shift attitudes, new information needs to provide a “causal alternative” to explain our mental models.

OK, so changing our own attitudes is tough but we can counter the stickiness of our attitudes by considering a few things:

• Values – linking specific actions to important values helps us to shift our attitudes. For example, we could begin to value why we started to work in health: was it job security? desire to help people? because people are constantly changing and different and it’s an exciting intellectual challenge? Whatever the value, we can begin altering the way we act towards the people we see to embrace the similarities between “them” and “us.
• Goals – we all vary in the level of general action we’re in. We range from being focused and both moving and thinking quickly to being completely inactive (such as when we’re asleep and not dreaming). Research has shown that if we want people to consider a new attitude, we need to frame this in the context of “being active” (Albarracin & Handley, 2011). Perhaps we need to think of the active part we play in pain rehabilitation – and consider the effects of our attitudes accordingly.
• Language – metaphors are persuasive, and seem to affect the way our attitudes are formed as well as what we do about them. Metaphors provide a way for us to become more psychologically distant from a concept, or more aware of complex psychological constructs. We can use metaphors when we think about how we want to work with people: are we ‘advisors’ or ‘coaches’ or ‘instructors’? Do we work collaboratively – or do we expect obedience? Do we have a partnership, or do we “direct” treatment?

Helping people stick with actions/goals/new habits

There have been mountains of research papers on behaviour change within a rehabilitation context. We’ve all been drilled on the idea of SMART goals (whatever the SMART acronym is meant to stand for!). We are exhorted to “set goals” from the first visit, and in some situations (New Zealand’s ACC rehabilitation process for example) obligates us to “set goals” which then provide a marker for whether treatment has been successful or not. Problem is, as Gardner, Refshauge, McAuley, Hubsher, Goodall & Smith (2018) found, we tend to set goals that we want, in collaboration with the people we’re working with, yes, but not necessarily the goals the person wants. In fact, their study showed that the treatment orientation of the clinician (all physiotherapists in this instance) predicted the degree of involvement from the person, with those therapists holding a stronger biomedical model being less likely to incorporate the person’s own goals.

Now here I’m going to put some of my clinical experience to work rather than focusing on research, though I hope that what I’m suggesting ties into researched ideas! Locke and Latham (1990) are the godfathers of formal goal setting theory, albeit mainly in an organisational development context, however they have provided much of the information we use when working with the people seeking our help. If you’re looking for more information on goal setting, you should probably begin with their material.

What to try:

• Begin with the end in mind. What does the person want to be able to do? Be wary of goals incorporating things no-one can completely control, such as “be able to win a race” – because someone else, on that day, may be faster that this person. Similarly, I’m wary of goals that talk about “pain-free” or “without flare-up” because we’re not always going to achieve this. Don’t forget to ask the person about what they want!! They probably don’t care too much about a 5 degree improvement in knee flexion – what they want to be able to do is go up and down stairs.
• Check out importance and particularly confidence when it comes to goals. A goal that’s unimportant will likely fall out of someone’s brain because it doesn’t matter. A goal that’s too challenging will equally be avoided (often not on purpose but because we don’t really like thinking about things we fear we’ll fail at). If the goal isn’t important – tap into values and why it might matter to the person. Change the goal if the person can’t come up with a compelling (ie emotionally resonant) reason to do it. Build confidence by scaffolding support around the person – how can you make it so that the person feels they can be successful? Begin with their ideas first so you build on their sense of self-efficacy.
• Generate actions to do rather than goals to achieve. Actions are done or not done. Dichomotous. Goals may or may not be achieved depending on a whole bunch of factors. Make the things the person needs to do simple and yes/no.
• Reminders or cues help. It’s easy to forget to do your pelvic floor exercises after birth, right? But a whole lot easier to remember when they’re tied into every time you use the toilet! Tie the action to an existing habit like when you’re waiting for the jug to boil, you can do your mindfulness. When you’re cleaning your teeth is a good time to do some squats (try it!). Use a cellphone appointment reminder. Record when the action is done. Set a specific time of day – ahead of time.
• Tracking actions helps keep on track. Graphs are great! Seeing your progress is reinforcing. But make this process easy – can it be done on the phone? Can it be recorded in a simple notebook? Check up on progress often. Problem solve when things don’t go the way you hope.
• Problem solve the factors that might interfere with doing the action ahead of time. This might mean posing scenario’s – what would happen if the weather was bad? What would you do if you had visitors? What might get in the way of doing this? What could you say to the person who says “Oh come on, you can leave it for today?”
• Have days off. Absolute goals that are very specific and must happen every single day are likely to fail, and then we fall into the “what the hell” effect – oh I didn’t do X, so what the hell I might as well not do anything. I recommend for daily actions, that we have two days a week where they don’t need to happen. You might want to plan for five walking sessions, and do them all in the first five days – and then have two days off for good behaviour, or even decide you’re on a roll, and do two extra days. Whatever, the person wins because they’ve achieved the original action.

There is no doubt that changing habits is tough. It’s even tougher when there are a lot of changes to implement. And even tougher still when the therapist sits in judgement of the person who is trying to juggle everything while not being at full capacity. I wonder if we as therapists could begin to view our work with people as a truly collaborative affair, where we recognise the incredible challenges the people we see are dealing with. Maybe our New Year’s Resolution could be “how to be a better therapist”.

Albarracın D, Handley IM. (2011). The time for doing is not the time for change: effects of general action and inaction goals on attitude retrieval and attitude change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 100(6):983–98

Albarracin, D., & Shavitt, S. (2018). Attitudes and Attitude Change. Annual Review of Psychology, 69(1), 299-327. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011911

Gardner, T., Refshauge, K., McAuley, J., Hübscher, M., Goodall, S., & Smith, L. (2018). Goal setting practice in chronic low back pain. What is current practice and is it affected by beliefs and attitudes? Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 1-11.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal setting & task performance: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Miles E, Crisp RJ. (2014). A meta-analytic test of the imagined contact hypothesis. Group Process. Intergroup Relations. 17(1):3–26

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

Exercise? Who me? Yoga or physiotherapy or education…

Exercise, while one of The Most Important self management approaches for persistent pain, is not an easy sell to someone who is experiencing pain. Especially not if that exercise looks like huffing and puffing, hauling on bits of metal in a gym, or wearing lycra. Not to mention the “sports drinks”…  Those things aside, exercising is a good thing. You heard it from me, and I have declared my body an exercise free zone! The thing is, what kind of exercise, for what purpose, and how to get introduced to it.

Personally I’m a fan of exercise that achieves something else other than “getting fit”. I like gardening, I love dancing, I enjoy cycling (especially to the store to get a GREAT coffee!). Walking the dog is fun. Swimming (especially snorkeling) is awesome! I like my exercise to do more than bring on the endorphins, especially as I don’t get much of that post-exertional analgesia that many people do – and believe me, they do (Ellinson, Stegner, Schwabacher, Koltyn & Cook, 2016). I like my exercise to look like the things I need or want to do, so that when I need to do ’em, I’m in fit state to get on and do ’em.

So what kind of exercise works best? One sage told me “the exercise the person does!” and there is some truth to that, so when I begin talking to someone about exercise, I’m looking for something they can do regularly, that fits into their lifestyle, that makes them feel good, and has some other benefit to them. That benefit might be the social thing – going to a box-fit class with a group of others all bent on getting their fix of play-fighting. It might be the solitary thing – long walks along the beach with the dog for company. It might be the music – in my case, it’s belly dance (and I dare anyone to do a 5 minute shimmy drill while keeping an isolated upper body, a loose shimmy and smile!).

I like the idea of having variety – who says we need to do the same kind of exercise every day? So it’s a wet day and I don’t fancy taking my bike out in the rain, I can turn to my dance practice, or do the dusting, or vacuum the floors. It’s a frosty day and I can go for a brisk walk and take photographs of gorgeous sparkly frosty droplets while Sheba-the-wonderdog huffs steam and sniffs at the local scents. If it’s a warm day, why not head to the pool for a lap or two? If it’s a busy day and I don’t have time, what about some “exercise snacks”? Five minutes of exercise every 25 minutes adds some pretty quickly, so it’s lunges and chair dips and wall presses and shimmy practice in between writing.

Over time we’re seeing more research looking particularly at yoga for persistent pain of all kinds. Yoga comes in many different forms, and in this case I’m guessing the more extreme forms of hot yoga and contortion is not being studied. Some of the studies are appearing in rather eminent journals, like this one from the Annals of Internal Medicine and authored by a very large team including Saper, Lemaster, Delitto and colleagues (2017).

This study is a “non-inferiority” study, looking to establish whether yoga or physiotherapy, or indeed education, can help people living with chronic low back pain. Now I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow analysis of the study, that’s for you to do. What I am going to do is look at what the yoga consisted of – and see why, perhaps, yoga is getting so much research interest. BTW, yoga was found to be non-inferior to physiotherapy, and both yoga and PT were more likely than education to have a clinically meaningful response, although neither yoga nor PT were superior to education.

This is the basic format of the yoga class: Each class began with relaxation and meditation exercises, yoga breathing, and yoga philosophy. It continued with yoga poses and
concluded with relaxation. Pose variations and aids (such as chair, strap, and blocks) accommodated various abilities. Thirty minutes of daily home practice, facilitated by a DVD, a manual, and take-home yoga supplies, was strongly encouraged.

Yoga appeals to many because it seems to begin where people are at – it’s not huffy-puffy, things don’t jiggle, and generally the classes begin and end with the ritual of breathing and meditation. I like the idea of yoga (and yes, I’ve done a class or two!), because it doesn’t involve a lot of gadgets, you can do it alone or in a group, and it feels good. What I don’t like about yoga is the need to get effective and consistent feedback about how well you’re performing the poses, especially in the beginning, which means it can be difficult to do on your own without a teacher.

For people who find exercising both difficult and painful, yoga is a good place to start. I think attending classes is crucial (or at least having an instructor and a mirror!). Learning to use the meditation and breathing is integral to the exercise – and it’s this that I think makes yoga an effective addition to the exercise toolkit. What I’m less sure of is whether it’s better than any other form of exercise – or, in my case, the many different types of movements that I use in my weekly routine. And there’s the rub. As an occupational therapist, exercise is something people choose to do as a form of occupation (valued and meaningful activity). I also enjoy a bunch of other movement-based occupations, and to me these are as valid as yoga or the PT exercises included in this study. What my approach lacks, however, is a researched basis for it.

But here’s the thing: to date the research supporting exercise for people with persistent pain shows modest effects. And those effects are completely lost if the person doesn’t do the exercise. So why not have a wide range of whole-body movement practices to draw on, allowing the person to pick and choose and get out and do something every day, even if it doesn’t fit with our modern notions of what exercise should be?

 

 

Ellingson, L. D., Stegner, A. J., Schwabacher, I. J., Koltyn, K. F., & Cook, D. B. (2016). Exercise Strengthens Central Nervous System Modulation of Pain in Fibromyalgia. Brain Sciences, 6(1), 8. http://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci6010008

Saper, R. B., Lemaster, C., Delitto, A., & et al. (2017). Yoga, physical therapy, or education for chronic low back pain: A randomized noninferiority trial. Annals of Internal Medicine. doi:10.7326/M16-2579

On the value of doing, being and becoming

An old occupational therapy tagline was “doing, being, becoming”. The meaning of this phrase is intended to point to the tight relationship between what we do, who we are, and how we develop and grow. As I read blogs discussing an increased emphasis on “real world” outcomes there is something missing from the narratives: that intangible quality that marks the difference between colouring in – and painting. Or filling in a form – and writing a poem. Going from room to room – and dancing. Something about expressing who we are and what we value.

Values are things we hold dear. They are principles, or “desired qualities of behaviour”, life directions (not destinations).

The things we do (our actions) are inevitably infused with our values because how we do things (sloppily, carefully, neatly, with gay abandon, enthusiastically) is an expression of what we think is important. To give you an example, I occasionally vacuum my house. Sometimes I’ll do it really thoroughly – because I love seeing a sparkling house. Sometimes I’ll do it with a flick and a promise – because it’s a beautiful day and I want to get out of the house. In both instances I’ve expressed something about what is important to me – I do enjoy seeing my home looking tidy and organised. I don’t have to have reasons for liking my home this way, I just do. When I do a quick flick through my home it’s not because I’m lazy or I don’t care, it’s because I value getting out of the house more than I value having a tidy and organised home on that day.

Values don’t have to be explained. We don’t have to have reasons for holding them. They’re something we choose to place as important.

Why be concerned about values? Well, they underpin our choices. They provide motivation towards some activities, and away from others.

There is a lot of emphasis at the moment on people with osteoarthritis “getting fit” and “doing exercise”. The current approach in New Zealand is to provide community-based programmes to people who have just been declined joint replacement surgery (because we can’t offer surgery to everyone who wants it). Uptake hasn’t been enormous, and to be honest I’m not surprised. People who haven’t been exercisers are not very likely to begin an exercise programme that is undoubtedly going to increase their pain in the short-term (because, duh, movement hurts!) even if the programme offers hope of improved pain and function in the future. Putting this into a “values” and “motivation” perspective, people usually value comfort over discomfort. They value short-term outcomes over long. If they’ve never exercised much, it’s clear that exercise isn’t something they value. To help them engage in an exercise programme, we need to work hard to identify values they hold dear so they’ll look to those to over-ride the value of comfort over discomfort.

An alternative might be to think of different ways of expressing values that will concurrently meet the goal of increased exercise. For example, I don’t enjoy exercise per se. In fact I’ve boasted that my body is an exercise-free zone! To tell the truth, that’s not exactly the case. I just don’t do “exercises”. Instead I dance. I get out of my chair for five minutes every 20 minutes and go do something involving my whole body. I garden. I play with the dog. I go out in the kayak. I walk miles when I’m fishing.

Some people would argue that “there’s no evidence base for this” – but I think we’ve forgotten that exercises are simply a planned and repetitive form of moving our bodies because we don’t do that nearly as much in modern times as we used to even in the early 1900’s, let alone in stone-age times. I don’t think hunter-gatherers “do exercises” except as training for something like war or hunting (to increase skill).

Living life with chronic pain must become a lifestyle. And it needs to be a lifestyle that has some life to it – not an endless series of “things we must do for health”, unless “health” is a particular value. If life is just about “things we do for health” doesn’t that constantly remind people of what they don’t have? That they’re not healthy? Making them patients instead of people? For most people, to be healthy is a means to an end: they want to connect with family, express who they are, contribute to their society, love and be loved. If the person in front of us isn’t into exercise, it’s OUR job to work out what they value and connect what we think is important to what they think is important, or we will simply fail.

Some simple steps to identify values – try these out in the clinic!

1. When a person attends your clinic, they’re expressing a value, that they care about something. Asking the person “what do you hope from coming to see me” is a pretty common opening line. Try extending this by, after they’ve answered, asking “why is that important to you?” or “what would it mean you could do” or “how would that make a difference to you?”
2. If a person says they don’t like something, try suggesting to them that they value the exact opposite. eg if they’ve said they really don’t like running, ask them why: “it’s boring” might be the answer. This answer suggests they like variety and excitement in their exercise routine. Then you can ask them what activities they see as exciting – maybe instead of running, they’d enjoy virtual boxing (bring out the Oculus Prime!), or a scavenger hunt, or geocaching.
3. Use the 1 – 10 “readiness ruler” technique from Motivational Interviewing. Ask the person to draw a line and put 1 at one end, and 10 at the other. 1 = not at all important and 10 = incredibly important. Then ask them to put a cross on the line to indicate the importance they place on doing exercise/healthy living/pain management (whatever you’re asking them to do). Then (and this is important!) ask them why they put that mark so high. This is important – even if that mark is down on 2!! Ask them why they put it there and not lower. This will help elicit important values that you can then use to connect what you want them to do with what they value.
   

Scopes, roles, boundaries, contributions: who does what in a brave new healthcare world?

I have been meaning to write a post like this for some time now, but prompted to today by two things: one is an ongoing debate about non-psychologists using “CBT” with people who are experiencing pain, and the other is a conversation with Chai Chuah, Director General of the Ministry of Health in New Zealand. Let me set the scene:

We know there are a lot of people in our communities who have relatively simple pain problems – a temporarily painful knee after walking up hills for the first time in ages, a painful back that “just happened” overnight, a rotator cuff problem that makes it difficult to get dressed or hang out washing. We know that there are some pretty simple things that will help in these situations: some reassurance that the awful thing the person is worried about isn’t likely to happen (no, you won’t end up in a wheelchair because of your back pain, and no it’s not cancer); some pain relief to help with sleeping more soundly and so we can keep doing things; and gradually returning to normal occupations including work even if the pain hasn’t completely gone.

We also know that approximately 8% of people with low back pain will ultimately end up contributing to the most enormous spend in healthcare that we know about – their pain continues, their distress increases, their disability is profound.

BUT before we put all our attention on to this small group of people, I think it’s worthwhile remembering that people in this group are also more likely to have other health conditions, they’re more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to have mental health problems; they also probably come from lower socioeconomic groups, groups including people from minority ethnicities, people who find it much harder to get work, to remain in education and perhaps even people who typically use healthcare more often than the people who get back on their feet more quickly. Data for these statements comes from the 2006 Health and Disability Survey in New Zealand and numerous studies by epidemiologists around the world  –  back pain is only one of a number of problems people in this group have to deal with. I’m also not saying everyone who gets back pain that lingers has all of these additional concerns – but there is a greater prevalence.

What does this mean?

Well, for a while I’ve been saying that people working in this area of health (musculoskeletal pain) seem to be developed a set of common skills. That is, there is more in common between me and Jason Silvernail, Mike Stewart, Paul Lagerman, Alison Sim, Lars Avemarie, Rajam Roose and many others around the world from many different health professions, than there is between me and a good chunk of people from my own profession of occupational therapy. And I don’t think I’m alone in noticing this. (ps please don’t be offended if I’ve left your name out – you KNOW I’m including you too!)

What’s common amongst us? The ability to see and work with complex, ambiguous, messy and multifactorial situations. Recognising that along with all of our individual professional skills, we also need to have

• effective communication skills,
• patient/person-centredness,
• critical thinking,
• generating a framework to work from,
• identifying and solving the unique goals and situations the people we work with have,
• ability to step beyond “this is my role” and into “what can be done to reduce this person’s distress and disability?”
• And possibly the most important skill is being able to tolerate not knowing without freaking out.

That ongoing cycle of assess -> hypothesise -> test -> review -> reassess -> hypothesise -> test -> reassess ->  review

This is important because when people come to see us with a complex problem (and increasingly this seems to happen), the simple models break down. The tissue-based, the germ-based, the simple single-factor approaches do not fully explain what’s going on, and don’t provide adequate solutions.

What this means is we, ALL health professionals, will need to think about where our skills lie. Are we people who enjoy pumping through a big number of relatively simple problems? If so, that’s great! Your contribution is clear-cut, you know what you need to do, and you refine and practice your skill-set until you’re expert. I think this is awesome. Or, are we people who relish complex, who look at situations and see that it’s messy and complicated but don’t get put off? In this group we probably use skills for researching and planning, operationalising or getting things started, and we’re often the people who network furiously. We do this not because we’re social butterflies (me being the ultimate introvert), but because we know WE CAN’T DO THIS WORK ALONE!

What about clinical skills and scopes and boundaries?

You know, I am not entirely sure that anyone except the health professional him or herself cares who does what they do to help someone get better. It’s not whether a nurse or a speech language therapist or a podiatrist or a medical practitioner, it’s whether the person (or people) treats each person as unique, listens carefully, is honest and straightforward about what can and can’t be done, and knows when his or her skills are not sufficient so calls in the rest of a team for help. There is a time for working beyond your scope, and a time for calling in an expert – but to recognise when an expert is needed requires knowing enough about the problem to know that an expert might be helpful.

What this means in healthcare, I think, is adopting a framework that works across diagnosis and into the idea that people actively process what happens to them, they make their minds up about what’s needed, and they can learn to do things differently. I’d call this self-management, but I could equally call it a cognitive behavioural approach, or behaviour change, or motivational approaches or even patient-centred or person-centred care. The idea that people understand more than we often give credit, that they make sense from what happens to and around them, and that this knowledge influences what they do comes from a cognitive behavioural model of people, and fits beautifully within a biopsychosocial framework.

So, when I advocate getting skilled at cognitive behavioural skills, I could equally use the term “person-centred” or “self-management” – whatever the label, the contributions from each professional involved will ultimately influence the health experience and actions of the person we’re seeing.

Isn’t it time to be excited about opportunities to develop and to extend our skills? And if this doesn’t excite you, isn’t it great that there are a group of people who will respond to the simple and straightforward – but let’s not confuse the two situations.

 

Pain Acceptance rather than Catastrophising influences work goal pursuit & achievement

We all know that having pain can act as a disincentive to doing things. What’s less clear is how, when a person is in chronic pain, life can continue. After all, life doesn’t stop just because pain is a daily companion. I’ve been interested in how people maintain living well despite their pain, because I think if we can work this out, some of the ongoing distress and despair experienced by people living with pain might be alleviated (while we wait for cures to appear).

The problem with studying daily life is that it’s complicated. What happened yesterday can influence what we do today. How well we sleep can make a difference to pain and fatigue. Over time, these changes influences can blur and for people living with pain it begins to be difficult to work out which came first: the pain, or the life disruption. Sophisticated mathematical procedures can now be used to model the effects of variations in individual’s experiences on factors that are important to an overall group. For example, if we track pain, fatigue and goals in a group of people, we can see that each person’s responses vary around their own personal “normal”. If we then add some additional factors, let’s say pain acceptance, or catastrophising, and look to see firstly how each individual’s “normal” varies with their own acceptance or catastrophising, then look at how overall grouped norms vary with these factors while controlling for the violation of usual assumptions in this kind of statistical analysis (like independence of each sample, for example), we can begin to examine the ways that pain, or goal pursuit vary depending on acceptance or catastrophising across time.

In the study I’m looking at today, this kind of multilevel modelling was used to examine the variability between pain intensity and positive and negative feelings and pain interference with goal pursuit and progress, as well as looking to see whether pain acceptance or catastrophising mediated the same outcomes.

The researchers found that pain intensity interfered with goal progress, but it didn’t do this directly. Instead, it did this via the individual’s perception of how much pain interfered with goal pursuit. In other words, when a person thinks that pain gets in the way of them doing things, this happens when they experience higher pain intensity that makes them feel that it’s hard to keep going with goals. Even if people feel OK in themselves, pain intensity makes it feel like it’s much harder to keep going.

But, what’s really interesting about this study is that pain acceptance exerts an independent influence on the strength of this relationship, far more than pain catastrophising (or thinking the worst). What this means is that even if pain intensity gets in the way of wanting to do things, people who accept their pain as part of themselves are more able to keep going.

The authors of this study point out that “not all individuals experience pain’s interference with goal pursuit to the same extent because interference is likely to depend on pain attitudes” (Mun, Karoly & Okun, 2015), and accepting pain seems to be one of the important factors that allow people to keep going. Catastrophising, as measured in this study, didn’t feature as a moderator, which is quite unusual, and the authors suggest that perhaps their using “trait” catastrophising instead of “state” catastrophising might have fuzzed this relationship, and that both forms of catastrophising should be measured in future.

An important point when interpreting this study: acceptance does not mean “OMG I’m just going to ignore my pain” or “OMG I’m just going to distract myself”. Instead, acceptance means reducing unhelpful brooding on pain, or trying to control pain (which just doesn’t really work, does it). Acceptance also means “I’m going to get on with what makes me feel like me” even if my pain goes up because I do. The authors suggest that acceptance might reduce pain’s disruptive influence on cognitive processes, meaning there’s more brain space to focus on moving towards important goals.

In addition to the cool finding that acceptance influences how much pain interferes with moving towards important goals, this study also found that being positive, or feeling good also reduced pain interference. Now this is really cool because I’ve been arguing that having fun is one of the first things that people living with chronic pain lose. And it’s rarely, if ever, included in pain management or rehabilitation approaches. Maybe it’s time to recognise that people doing important and fun things that they value might actually be a motivating approach that could instill confidence and “stickability” when developing rehabilitation programmes.

Mun CJ, Karoly P, & Okun MA (2015). Effects of daily pain intensity, positive affect, and individual differences in pain acceptance on work goal interference and progress. Pain, 156 (11), 2276-85 PMID: 26469319

Some people are ready to change and others are not – James Gordon

The full quote is actually:

“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t… It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.”
― James Gordon

Oh how true is that. And any health professional will tell you that there’s just no point pushing for change when the person isn’t ready for it. So often we encounter people who are unhappy with their lot in life, struggling with this and that, and yet they just don’t make changes that seemingly sit right in front of their faces. It’s SO frustrating!

Or, in my case, it used to be so frustrating – because a few years ago I discovered an approach that revolutionised my practice and made me take another look at my expectations and beliefs about motivation. More about that shortly.

This post arose out of the recent publication of a paper by Sarah Hardcastle and colleagues from the Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Research Group at Curtin University in Perth. “Motivating the unmotivated: How can health behavior be changed in those unwilling to change?”

This paper outlines several theoretical approaches that have given health professionals some powerful tools to use when working with people who could change but haven’t.  In order to help people in this space, the authors argue that we really need to understand why it is they don’t have “motivation”. So, what is motivation? Simply put, it’s the desire to do things. And for many of us, we think of it as a “thing” that you either have, or you haven’t. But motivation is a tricky thing – ever been disinclined to go visit someone who’s invited you to dinner, dragged yourself there and then had a fantastic time? Or had one of those ideas that flash through your mind, get all excited about it … but never get around to it? Motivation is a fluid thing and doesn’t always equate to action!

Amotivation, or lacking in motivation, is quite specific to a particular action or set of actions. It may be because a person doesn’t think he or she will be successful if they try. Why bother if you know you’re going to fail? This is about having low self-efficacy, or low confidence and thinking it’s not possible to obtain skills or capabilities to be successful.

Amotivation can also occur if a person thinks it’s going to take more out of them than the rewards from doing it. The costs outweigh the benefits. And it can occur when the effort needed to overcome barriers or to push through feels too much, or the change just doesn’t seem worth it because it’s not that big a deal.

Here’s where I come back to my revolution a few years ago – I found that by using motivational interviewing, I was able to shift the responsibility for making a decision to change back to the person (instead of trying to “make it” happen), but at the same time, recognising the reasons for the person staying where they were. To me, it boils down to respecting that people don’t do dumb stuff for fun. There’s usually very good reasons for them having made a decision, either to make a change, or NOT to make a change. What they’re currently doing works, at least to a certain extent.

Using motivational interviewing, the first and most important thing to learn is to respect the person and take the time to understand the good things they recognise about their current situation. Because there are always some good things about being stuck – it’s easier, for one, than making a change. It’s familiar. It’s worked once or twice. People know what to expect. Change always means disruption somewhere, and that’s not comfortable or easy.

If we look at the reasons I outlined for NOT making a change, and work through them, I think (and so do the authors of this paper!) that there are some things we can do to make change less difficult, and in so doing, build momentum for change.

1. Lack of self-efficacy – if someone doesn’t think he or she will succeed, why would they even begin? Personally I think this is a big part of “lack of motivation for returning to work” which is something I’ve seen written in way too many clinical reports. If someone doesn’t think they’ll be successful, how could we make the change less challenging? Increase support? Make the steps smaller? Look at other things the person has been successful in? Find out how they’ve made changes successfully in the past and use that?
2. Not valued highly – or, something else is more valued than this right now. Respecting that there is a time and place for things to be done, and that other things in life can over-ride making changes is both authentic and human. It means that this change isn’t yet important enough – so, how do you build importance? To me, importance is about values and what a person wants in his or her life. There are often discrepancies between what we want and what we’re doing, and sometimes this is because it’s too difficult or messy to think about it. I think part of our job as health professionals of any discipline is to help people consider things that are tough. To reflect on the short and long-term outcomes of carrying on in status quo, and the same if we made a successful change. Things we do because they’re more comfortable in the short-term can be incompatible with what we really want long-term. It’s part of my job to help people think about this. NOT, I hasten to add, to “make” them decide in any particular direction. That’s not my job, I’m there to help people think about how their actions today might affect the future, and let them make their own decisions. At the same time, I can choose to reflect the reality of the long-term effects of today’s actions. That’s being responsible as a health professional.
3. Feeling the end result isn’t worth it, or that there are too many things in the way – again, to me this feels a lot like addressing self-efficacy. If there are things in the way, or it feels too hard, then part of my job is to help the person find a way that is within their capabilities, and to grab a vision of what it might feel like to have successfully achieved that end result. Asking the person to “look forward” to a few months, years down the track – what would it look like if they made a change that worked? How would this affect what’s important to you? If you decided not to make a change, what would things be like? Would that be what you want?
4. Habits making it hard to think about changing – It’s easy to over-indulge on chocolate when there’s one of those “treat boxes” in the workplace. It’s easy to go home and stay at home rather than go for a run if you don’t have running shoes and a change of clothes in your car. Environmental triggers where it’s easier NOT to do a healthy thing make it difficult for someone who’s just not even thought about making a change. Employers, healthcare facilities and both local and central government can make it harder for people to do unhealthy things simply by structuring when and where people can access them. So the carpark a little further from the workplace can make it easier to get more exercise each day, banning smoking from healthcare facility grounds makes it harder to get a smoke break, having healthy options in the “treat box” can make it easier to choose something healthy. This set of changes can feel a bit “nanny state”, but they’re effective and useful when it’s those simple little changes that make the difference between living well, or not.

Motivating for health behaviour change starts with building confidence and importance. Maintaining behaviour change involves a lot more – but that’s for another post. In the meantime, I think Atoine de Saint-Exupery had it right when he said:

“Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Hardcastle, S.J., Hancox, J., Hattar, A., Maxwell-Smith, C., Thøgersen-Ntoumani, C., & Hagger, M.S. (2015). Motivating the unmotivated: How can health behavior be changed in those unwilling to change? Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 835. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00835

What does using a biopsychosocial framework mean in practice?

A good friend of mine told me that during her training (as a physiotherapist), psychosocial factors were “what you blame when your treatment doesn’t work”. It’s something I’ve heard more than once. I’ve also been asked many times “…but are you sure you’re not doing something outside your scope of practice?” when I talk about using cognitive behavioural principles and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and other psychological strategies. And some of you might have seen earlier posts of mine where I ask “How social is your biopsychosocial model?”

Today’s medical students are trained in using a biopsychosocial framework in their undergraduate years. They leave medical school, begin their hospital and advanced training, and I guess I wouldn’t be alone in asking “what happened to the psychosocial?” when we see them working.

So today’s post is a bit of a reflection and a musing on what I think using a BPS approach might mean in pain practice.

BPS is, I think, less of a “model” than a way of thinking. Thinking that is based on a systems approach – every factor affects and is affected by every other factor. In fact, Engel, the originator of this way of viewing human health, was strongly influenced by general systems theory which was developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a biologist who lived between 1901 – 1972. General systems theory was a model describing processes thought to be common in many different fields of knowledge. General systems theory is based on these five beliefs:

(1)  There is a general tendency towards integration in the various sciences, natural and social.

(2)  Such integration seems to be centred in a general theory of systems.

(3)  Such theory may be an important means of aiming at exact theory in the nonphysical fields of science.

(4)  Developing unifying principles running ‘vertically’ through the universe of the individual sciences, this theory brings us nearer to the goal of the unity of science.

(5)  This can lead to a much-needed integration in scientific education.

Engel then applied this to a model of the influences on human health. At the time he wrote his seminal article (Engel, 1977), psychiatrists were being challenged by reductionism on the one hand, particularly around approaches to mental health – the distinction between “diseases” where biological causal factors are influential, such as neurological disorders, and “problems of living” such as alcoholism, where the relevance of biology was, at the time, hotly debated; and concern that psychiatrists might lose ground to nonmedical practitioners such as psychologists. It’s an argument that continues today: should, for example, nonspecific low back pain be the domain of medical practitioners or should physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists and others pick up primary responsibility for its management? (For a very interesting discussion of socio-political debates about this, read Wilson, N., Pope, C., Roberts, L., & Crouch, R. (2014). Governing healthcare: Finding meaning in a clinical practice guideline for the management of non-specific low back pain. Social Science & Medicine, 102(0), 138-145. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.11.055)

Back to the story. The broad BPS “model” can’t be tested, and to some, was never intended to be a “scientific” model but rather a discussion tool. A way of shaping a dialogue between the person seeking help, and the clinician wanting to understand what was influencing how and why this person was presenting in this way at this time. I like to think of it as a way to remember that the person seeing you is a person-in-context.

We can argue the toss about exactly which factors belong in which “bit” of a biopsychosocial approach, but broadly speaking, we want to understand biological influences on health. Some of these are genetic (a bit hard to investigate for most of us), some of these are environmental (rickets? Vit D deficiency?), some are other organisms (M. leprae and M. lepromatosis? – Leprosy to you and me). Some are associated with what people do – tripping, jumping off things; while some are associated with what people don’t do – manage diabetes, exercise. The bio part is far more readily assessed and addressed than the other messy bits and pieces, so I won’t deal with that any further.

The psychosocial, on the other hand, is messy. It’s muddled and hard to measure and changes over time and geography and culture.

To me, it means remembering that when two people get together, it’s not just about the words we use, it’s about what we both bring to the setting in terms of experience, habits, expectations, vulnerabilities. It’s about where we meet. It’s about the purpose of meeting. It’s about recognising that everything we say and do is imbued with meaning – but it’s also about not necessarily knowing what we know, or what we don’t know.

So if I’m practicing in a biopsychosocial framework, I’m going to have to know a great deal about myself and my assumptions, my attitudes, habits, how others see me, and even what I don’t know. And the same applies to my knowledge about the person I’m seeing – only because I’m usually the “treatment provider”, I need to shape my conversation so that it’s OK for that person to tell me about this stuff, and this means knowing a bit about how people tick. I especially need to know how to hear what the person coming to me is saying – and not saying.

I see much that is called “psychological” as being about how we communicate and what we know about helping people change behaviour. I’m not “doing psychology” when I teach my child how to tie shoelaces, yet I’m using psychological techniques – modeling, reinforcement, verbal instructions and so on. Likewise when I’m helping someone feel OK about driving their car when they have back pain, I’m using psychological techniques such as verbal instruction, grading the difficulty, encouraging, supporting and so on. To suggest we can’t use psychological techniques to enable normal function is unthinkable.

Using CBT or ACT or motivation interviewing simply means refining my interpersonal skills so that I can optimise the chances that the person feels heard, can understand what I’m on about, and begins to feel OK about taking steps towards the life they want and being themselves. It’s about learning ways of explaining things, learning how to show that I’m listening, learning about the right level of support and challenge that will enhance the chances of success. Most people who live with chronic pain probably don’t need to see a psychologist – they need someone to help them make sense of pain, to show they’re there as they find their way through, and celebrate when they’re doing what’s important in their lives. I think all health professionals should be doing this.

Engel, G.L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129-136. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.847460

Developing a shared plan

Last week I introduced you to one way I use to develop a shared understanding of the many factors influencing how and why a person seeks help for their pain.  The person and I work together to understand his or her perspective. I use a range of open-ended questions and reflective listening to guide our discovery of how his/her pain affects life and emotions.

Some points to note:

• I don’t try to give explanations at this point – explanations will influence what the person says to me, and may inadvertently shape or change what he or she says without necessarily changing his or her beliefs.
• I’m not trying to make any diagnoses either. A diagnosis is just a short-hand way of lumping a bunch of symptoms together. Great for research, and great for when we have a clear treatment, but a diagnosis tells us nothing about how the problem is affecting this person at this time. And in pain we’re always looking at the person and his or her experience, because even if we successfully get rid of the pain, the person will have learned something through the experience and this will influence the person in the future.
• I’m informed by what we know about pain from research, so I’m constantly probing and looking for the relationships between factors we know will affect the person. Note that I’m not looking for tissue-level influences, but rather I’m investigating at a “person” level. This means I’m looking at psychological and sociological processes. I’m not ignoring those tissue-level factors, but I’m placing those off to one side for the moment. There are a couple of reasons for this: the first is that I’m probably not going to directly influence tissue-level factors. I don’t lay hands on people. I don’t give drugs. The second is that the person isn’t likely to be aware of those factors. They know much of their own experience (not all – but we’ll come to that), and experience and perception are the most potent drivers of what a person believes and therefore does.
• I try wherever possible to flesh out my interview with additional information. This might be from questionnaires, or observing, or clinical notes from other people. And yes, I incorporate this information with the full knowledge of the person – in fact, they’re part of the process of integrating this information.

What do I end up with?

A spaghetti junction! A diagram that looks a lot like this:

This diagram is a pretty simple one, when you think of all the factors that could be involved – and in this case, I’ve made it much clearer than my usual scribble!

At this point I have a series of hypotheses to explain why Gerald is in this state. Together with Gerald, we’ve established that there could be some fear of pain, and in particular, fear that Gerald won’t be able to cope if his pain goes up and doesn’t settle. Gerald has also identified that he can feel helpless at these times, because he doesn’t know what else to do to manage his pain. He believes he’s getting unfit, and that’s adding to his feelings of frustration. He doesn’t want to go out with his mates because he’s irritable. He tries not to let his wife know how he’s feeling to protect her, but this adds to him feeling isolated. He doesn’t want to go back to work, not because he’s not motivated, but because he’s afraid he’ll let them down and this will add to his guilt. He doesn’t think his case manager understands this.

I could ask Gerald to list his main concerns and use these as a guide for my treatment outcomes, but I’ve recently started using a different approach. I’ll ask Gerald what he would be doing differently if his pain wasn’t such a problem to him.

Bronnie: Let’s imagine for a minute, what would you be doing differently if your pain wasn’t such a problem?

Gerald: Well, I’d be back at work, for one thing.

Bronnie: OK, and would you think you’d be back at work full time, or ease your way back in?

Gerald: Well, I think it would be sensible to ease myself back in because it’s been a while and I’m out of shape. Better to know I can do it than have a go and fail.

Bronnie: Great idea. What else would you be doing differently if your pain wasn’t such a problem?

Gerald: I’d take my wife out for dinner, it’s been hard on her while I’m so laid up and grumpy.

Bronnie: What’s your main concern about going out to dinner with your wife right now?

Gerald: I can’t sit long enough to enjoy a meal out. It all seems so hard, to get into a car, and drive to a restaurant, and sit there for three courses. I’m just too sore to do it.

Bronnie: So going to a restaurant and sitting to get there and while you’re there is going to increase your pain?

Gerald: Yeah. Is it worth it? What if it doesn’t settle? I can’t sleep and then the next day I’m shattered. I don’t think it’s worth it.

Bronnie: OK. Is there anything else you’d be doing if your pain wasn’t such a problem for you?

Gerald: I’d be going out and seeing my mates, going fishing and 4 wheel driving. I miss that. There’s no way I could do that right now.

Bronnie: What’s your main concern about going fishing, and seeing your mates at the moment?

Gerald: I’d be ready to go home before they’d even started. They’d get fed up with me slowing them down. And casting is really hard on my neck.

Bronnie: So to sum up then, it seems like there are some things you’d love to be doing, but reasons you think it would be better not to be doing them right now. If we go through them, you’d love to go back to work, but you’d like to do it gradually so you can get in shape again, and so you know you’ll succeed. You’d love to take your wife out for dinner, but the whole dinner thing feels too hard, and you’re worried that your pain will get out of hand and you won’t be able to sleep. And you’d really love to get back out with your mates again, and go fishing, but right now you think your mates would get fed up with you because you’d want to leave too early, and you wouldn’t be able to cast without setting your pain off. Does that sound about right?

Gerald: Yeah.

Bronnie: I think there are some things we could begin to work on so you feel more confident you can handle it when your pain levels go up and down. And I think we could work on some physical things that could help you feel a bit fitter, more able to do things for longer. And finally, I think it would be great if we could help you and your wife connect a bit more, perhaps not yet at a sit-down restaurant, but perhaps there are other ways this could happen. What are your thoughts? Is there anything you’d especially like to look at?

What I’ve tried to do here is identify the underlying reasons Gerald isn’t doing things. While pain appears to be the problem, it’s not the pain it self but the fear of possible effects of pain that haven’t even happened yet that are really stopping him from doing things. And this is adding to the misery of having neck pain.

By giving Gerald the chance to tell me his dreams, we’re going beyond “I need to get rid of my pain” and into the reasons for living in the first place. People don’t just live to get rid of pain, they live to have lives full of meaning, let’s not ever forget that.