N of 1 studies – great examples

It’s true that ‘unconventional’ studies of any kind don’t get published as readily as conventional RCTs even if those studies are under-powered, have errors in their construction and don’t tell us much of anything. Grrr. Publishing studies from my PhD has been fraught because I chose a form of grounded theory that doesn’t conform to the conventional constructivist or Straussian approach. What, then are we to do?

Two things strike me: first we always need to select a research method to give us the best answer to our research question, not something that will ‘get published’ easily. There are many research questions and RCTs simply don’t answer them all. A quantitative method doesn’t lend itself to ‘why’ questions and inevitably require assumptions about the factors thought to be relevant, the measurement strategy, the underlying theory explaining what’s going on. This doesn’t really help us when we have a new field of study to look at, where there is no clear theoretical explanation, where measures don’t measure what’s relevant. Hence drawing on different designs like mixed methods and qualitative approaches. From a pragmatic perspective, the numbers needed for an RCT are much greater than most clinicians can find unless they’re working in a large research setting (and have a bit of funding!). Nevertheless, ‘pilot’ studies using RCT methods do get published even when they don’t have huge explanatory power, partly because they’re familiar to the reviewers.

The second thing that strikes me is: we need to have good exemplars. These give us a template of sorts to learn how to conduct good research, how to communicate why a particular ‘unconventional’ method is the best way to answer the question, and how to write the results/findings in a way that is compelling.

I’ve written before about the failure of much research in human behaviour and experience to understand that ergodic theorum is violated in grouped statistics. This means we can deeply question the results as they apply to the person we see in the clinic. Ergodicity implies that all people in a group will ultimately follow the same trajectory, develop in the same way over the same time, respond to treatment in the same way and follow the same processes. But clinicians know that some people respond very quickly to a component in a programme, while others don’t.

I recently found this example from Tarko (2005) and cited in Lowie & Verspoor (2019)

OK, ’nuff said. Ergodicity matters.

Choosing the right research strategy begins with having a good research question, and most clinicians have a very good research question: what is the best treatment I can offer this person presenting in this way at this time? The follow-up question is: is this treatment helping? or… to be more precise, which component of my treatment/s are helping?

It’s this question that N=1 or single case experimental designs are intended to answer, and they do it very well.

Here are some great examples of published studies using intensive repeated measures – and we need more of these!

Lydon-Staley, D. M., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2020). Within-person variability in curiosity during daily life and associations with well-being. Journal of Personality, 88(4), 625-641. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12515

I included this one because it’s not about pain! And yet it sheds light on something important in pain management. Curiosity is about being intrigued by novel, unfamiliar situations. Curiosity doesn’t flourish when a person is anxious, but does when people are wanting to increase their knowledge and skills, and it’s associated with greater well-being. So it’s something clinicians might want to foster – especially for someone who has become afraid to rely on their body and body sensations. In this study, people were asked to complete a daily diary and do some internet browsing (yay! my favourite thing to do!). After some fairly complex statistical analysis (described in good detail in this paper), the results from 167 people who completed 21 days of daily diary measures and a one-off set of measures showed that being consistently curious is associated with feeling good – AND that doing physical movement practices might enhance curiosity via improving mood. Now that’s worth knowing.

Mun, C. J., Thummala, K., Davis, M. C., Karoly, P., Tennen, H., & Zautra, A. J. (2017). Predictors and social consequences of daily pain expectancy among adults with chronic pain. Pain, 158(7), 1224-1233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000903

Now this study is a big one – 231 people in study one, and 220 people in study two. Cutting to the chase, these researchers found that people who expected high pain in the evening experienced greater pain the next day, even when controlling for current pain intensity. The study also found that morning pain predicted next afternoon social enjoyment but not social stress. And what this means is…. clinicians need to promote joy/fun/positive affect, and to help people reduce their expectations that their pain will inevitably increase or ‘be bad’ – it’s anticipation that seems to influence pain intensity and avoidance. These study designs allow researchers to tease apart the factors contributing to experiences over time. We need more of them!

Hollander, M. D., de Jong, J., Onghena, P., & Vlaeyen, J. W. S. (2020). Generalization of exposure in vivo in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome type I. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 124. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2019.103511

And from a large study to a much smaller one with – wait for it – 8 participants! That’s more like the numbers we see in clinic, right? This study examined whether it’s more fruitful to expose people to many activities they’ve previously avoided, or instead, to limit the number of activities each person was exposed to. This is SUCH an important component of therapy where people have avoided doing things that bother them because they anticipate either that their pain will go to untolerable levels (or interfere with other important things like sleep) or because they’re worried they’ll do harm to themselves. Why? Because doing things in one safe space is not life. We do lots of activities in lots of different spaces, and most of them are unpredictable and we don’t have a ‘safe person’ to rely on. It’s perhaps one of the reasons exercise carried out in a gym might not transfer into greater reductions in disability in daily life – and why involving occupational therapists in pain management as ‘knowledge translation experts’ is such a good thing.

Caneiro, J. P., Smith, A., Rabey, M., Moseley, G. L., & O’Sullivan, P. (2017). Process of Change in Pain-Related Fear: Clinical Insights From a Single Case Report of Persistent Back Pain Managed With Cognitive Functional Therapy. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 47(9), 637-651. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2017.7371

Lucky last – a single case study exploring the process of change experienced by one person undergoing cognitive functional therapy. While recent meta-analyses suggest CFT is ‘no better’ than any other treatment for people with persistent pain, what meta-analyses can’t show is those for whom it’s highly effective. Why? Because individual responses don’t show up in meta-analyses, and the mean or even the confidence intervals don’t show those people who do extremely well – or those who don’t do well at all. And yet as clinicians, we deal with each individual.

Now I chose these four studies because they are all published in highly respected and ‘highly ranked’ journals. I don’t care a fig about the supposed rank of a journal, but there’s no doubt that getting into one of these journals requires research of a very good standard. And somehow these ones snuck through!

Am I suggesting that RCTs shouldn’t feature in research? No – but I do think a much more careful analysis of these is needed, so we can understand the golden question: what works for whom and when? And to answer these questions we need far more detailed analysis. Oh – and evidence-based healthcare has always been a synthesis of THREE elements – research yes, clinician’s experience AND the person’s preferences and values. ALL THREE not just ‘research’ and out of research, not just RCTs.

Lowie, W. M., & Verspoor, M. H. (2019). Individual Differences and the Ergodicity Problem. Language Learning, 69, 184-206. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12324

Tarko, V. (2005, December 29). What is ergodicity? Individual behavior and ensembles. Softpedia News. Retrieved from https://news.softpedia.com/news/ What-is-ergodicity-15686.shtml

If a rose is a rose by any other name, how should we study treatment processes in pain management & rehabilitation?

A new instalment in my series about intensive longitudinal studies, aka ecological momentary assessment (and a host of other names for methods used to study daily life in real time in the real world).

Daily life is the focus of occupational therapy – doing what needs to be done, or a person wants to do, in everyday life. It’s complex because unlike a laboratory (or a large, well-controlled randomised controlled trial) daily life is messy and there is no way to control all the interacting factors that influence why a person does what they do. A technical term for the processes involved is microtemporality, or the relationships between factors in the short-term, like hours or days.

For example, let’s take the effect of a cup of coffee on my alertness when writing each day. I get up in the morning, feeling sluggish and not very coherent. I make that first delicious cup of coffee, slurp it down while I read the news headlines, and about 20 minutes later I start feeling a lot perkier and get cracking on my writing. Over the morning, my pep drops and I grab another cup or a go for a brief walk or catch up with a friend, and once again I feel energised.

If I wanted to see the effect of coffee on alertness I could do a RCT, making the conditions standard for all participants, controlling for the hours of sleep they had, giving them all a standard dose of caffeine and a standard cognitive test. Provided I have chosen people at random, so the chance of being in either the control group (who got the Devil’s drink, decaffeinated pseudo-coffee) or the experimental group was a toss of the coin, and provided we assume that anyone who has coffee will respond in the same way, and the tests were all equally valid and reliable, and the testing context is something like the world participants will be in, the results ought to tell us two things: (1) we can safely reject the null hypothesis (that there is no difference between decaffeinated coffee and real coffee on alertness) and (2) we can generalise from the results to what happens in the real world.

Now of course, this is how most of our research is carried out (or the ‘trustworthy’ research we rely on) – but what it doesn’t tell us as occupational therapists is whether this person in front of me will be in the very top or bottom of the bell curve in their response, and whether this will have any impact on what they need to do today.

For this unique person, we might choose another method, because we’re dealing only with this one person not the rest of the population, and we’re interested in the real world impact of coffee on this individual’s feelings of alertness. We can choose single case experimental design, where we ask the person to rate their alertness four or five times every day while they go about their usual daily life. We do this for long enough until we can see any patterns in their level of alertness ratings, and be satisfied that we’re observing their ‘normal’. During this time we don’t ask them to change their coffee drinking habits, but we do ask them to record their intake.

Then we get nasty, we give them the Devil’s decaf instead of the real deliciousness, but we do this without them knowing! So it looks just the same as the real thing, comes in the same container with the same labeling, and hope that it has the same delicious flavour. We ask them to carry on drinking as normal, and rating their alertness levels four or five times every day, and we do this for another two weeks. The only things we need to watch carefully for is that they don’t suspect a thing, and that their daily life doesn’t change (that’s why we do a baseline first).

Just because we’re a bit obsessed, and because we’re interested in the real world impact, we sneakily switch out the rubbish decaf and replace it with the real thing – again without the person knowing – and we get them to carry on recording. If we’re really obsessed, we can switch the real thing out after two weeks, and replace with the pseudo coffee, and rinse and repeat.

Now in this example we’re only recording two things: the self-reported level of alertness, and whether it’s the real coffee or not (but the person doesn’t suspect a thing, so doesn’t know we’ve been so incredibly devious).

We can then draw up some cool graphs to show the level of alertness changes over the course of each day, and with and without the real coffee. Just by eyeballing the graphs we can probably tell what’s going on…

Usually in pain management and rehabilitation we’re investigating the impact of more than one factor on something else. For example, we’re interested in pain intensity and sleep, or worry and pain intensity and sleep. This makes the statistics a bit more complex, because the relationships might not be as direct as coffee on alertness! For example, is it pain intensity that influences how much worrying a person does, and does the worry directly affect sleep? Or is it having a night of rotten sleep that directly influences worrying and then pain intensity increases?

To begin with however, occupational therapists could spend some time considering single case experimental designs with a very simple strategy such as I’ve described above. It’s not easy because we rarely ‘administer’ an intervention that doesn’t have lingering effects. For example, we can’t make someone forget something we’ve told them. This means we can’t substitute ‘real’ advice with ‘fake’ advice like we can with coffee and decaf. The ‘real’ advice will likely hang around in the person’s memory, as will the ‘fake’ advice, so they’ll influence how much the person believes and then acts on that information. There are strategies to get around this such as multiple baseline designs (see the Kazdin (2019) and Kratochwill et al., (2012) article for their suggestions as to what this looks like), and for a rehabilitation-oriented paper, Krasny-Pacini & Evans (2018) is a great resource.

If you’re intrigued by this way of systematically doing research with individuals but wonder if it’s been used in pain management – fear not! Some of the most influential researchers in the game have used this approach, and I’ve included a list below – it’s not exhaustive…

Next post I’ll look at some practical ways to introduce single case intensive longitudinal design into your practice. BTW It’s not just for occupational therapists – the paper by Ruissen et al., (2022) looks at physical activity and psychological processes, so everyone is invited to this party!

Selected Pain Rehab SCED studies (from oldest to most recent)

Vlaeyen, J. W., de Jong, J., Geilen, M., Heuts, P. H., & van Breukelen, G. (2001). Graded exposure in vivo in the treatment of pain-related fear: a replicated single-case experimental design in four patients with chronic low back pain. Behaviour Research & Therapy., 39(2), 151-166.

Asenlof, P., Denison, E., & Lindberg, P. (2005). Individually tailored treatment targeting motor behavior, cognition, and disability: 2 experimental single-case studies of patients with recurrent and persistent musculoskeletal pain in primary health care. Physical Therapy, 85(10), 1061-1077.

de Jong, J. R., Vlaeyen, J. W., Onghena, P., Cuypers, C., den Hollander, M., & Ruijgrok, J. (2005). Reduction of pain-related fear in complex regional pain syndrome type I: the application of graded exposure in vivo. Pain, 116(3), 264-275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2005.04.019

de Jong, J. R., Vlaeyen, J. W. S., Onghena, P., Goossens, M. E. J. B., Geilen, M., & Mulder, H. (2005). Fear of Movement/(Re)injury in Chronic Low Back Pain: Education or Exposure In Vivo as Mediator to Fear Reduction? Clinical Journal of Pain Special Topic Series: Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Chronic Pain January/February, 21(1), 9-17.

Onghena, P., & Edgington, E. S. (2005). Customization of pain treatments: single-case design and analysis. Clinical Journal of Pain, 21(1), 56-68.

Lundervold, D. A., Talley, C., & Buermann, M. (2006). Effect of Behavioral Activation Treatment on fibromyalgia-related pain anxiety cognition. International Journal of Behavioral Consultation and Therapy, 2(1), 73-84.

Flink, I. K., Nicholas, M. K., Boersma, K., & Linton, S. J. (2009). Reducing the threat value of chronic pain: A preliminary replicated single-case study of interoceptive exposure versus distraction in six individuals with chronic back pain. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47(8), 721-728. https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.brat.2009.05.003

Schemer, L., Vlaeyen, J. W., Doerr, J. M., Skoluda, N., Nater, U. M., Rief, W., & Glombiewski, J. A. (2018). Treatment processes during exposure and cognitive-behavioral therapy for chronic back pain: A single-case experimental design with multiple baselines. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 108, 58-67. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2018.07.002

Caneiro, J. P., Smith, A., Linton, S. J., Moseley, G. L., & O’Sullivan, P. (2019). How does change unfold? an evaluation of the process of change in four people with chronic low back pain and high pain-related fear managed with Cognitive Functional Therapy: A replicated single-case experimental design study. Behavior Research & Therapy, 117, 28-39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2019.02.007

Svanberg, M., Johansson, A. C., & Boersma, K. (2019). Does validation and alliance during the multimodal investigation affect patients’ acceptance of chronic pain? An experimental single case study. Scandinavian Journal of Pain, 19(1), 73-82.

E. Simons, L., Vlaeyen, J. W. S., Declercq, L., M. Smith, A., Beebe, J., Hogan, M., Li, E., A. Kronman, C., Mahmud, F., R. Corey, J., B. Sieberg, C., & Ploski, C. (2020). Avoid or engage? Outcomes of graded exposure in youth with chronic pain using a sequential replicated single-case randomized design. Pain, 161(3), 520-531.

Hollander, M. D., de Jong, J., Onghena, P., & Vlaeyen, J. W. S. (2020). Generalization of exposure in vivo in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome type I. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 124. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2019.103511

Edwin de Raaij, E. J., Harriet Wittink, H., Francois Maissan, J. F., Jos Twisk, J., & Raymond Ostelo, R. (2022). Illness perceptions; exploring mediators and/or moderators in disabling persistent low back pain. Multiple baseline single-case experimental design. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 23(1), 140. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-022-05031-3

References

Kazdin, A. E. (2019). Single-case experimental designs. Evaluating interventions in research and clinical practice. Behav Res Ther, 117, 3-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2018.11.015

Krasny-Pacini, A., & Evans, J. (2018). Single-case experimental designs to assess intervention effectiveness in rehabilitation: A practical guide. Annals of Physical & Rehabilitation Medicine, 61(3), 164-179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rehab.2017.12.002

Kratochwill, T. R., Hitchcock, J. H., Horner, R. H., Levin, J. R., Odom, S. L., Rindskopf, D. M., & Shadish, W. R. (2012). Single-Case Intervention Research Design Standards. Remedial and Special Education, 34(1), 26-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932512452794

Ruissen, G. R., Zumbo, B. D., Rhodes, R. E., Puterman, E., & Beauchamp, M. R. (2022). Analysis of dynamic psychological processes to understand and promote physical activity behaviour using intensive longitudinal methods: a primer. Health Psychology Review, 16(4), 492-525. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2021.1987953

Pain concepts for practice: Occupational therapists

Registration opens 11 Feburary 2023, click here for more details – click

Numbers limited to 20 to ensure a great learning experience.

Fundamental concepts for clinical practice including pain neurobiology, assessment, formulation and therapy.

What’s the relationship between pain intensity and functional limitations?

This question comes up from time to time as some commentators strive to “find the cause and fix the problem at all cost.” The argument is that if pain was gone, the person would simply return to their old life just as they were. And for what it’s worth, there’s certainly a relationship between pain intensity and disability, and pain intensity and distress – but it’s not simple.

One of the earliest papers I read when I was beginning my pain management career is one by Waddell, Main, Morris, Di Paola & Gray (1984). Gordon Waddell was an orthopaedic surgeon with an interest in low back pain – and an equal interest in what people do when they’re sore. In collaboration with Chris Main and others, he examined 200 people referred from family doctors for low back pain, and analysed psychological questionnaires administered to this same group. The process this team used to establish the results was rigorous by any standard, but especially rigorous at the time: they carried out pilot interviews and exams on 182 people, then carried out a further analysis of impairment and disability on a different group of 160 people, conducted this study with 200 people, and further cross-checked with a second group of 120 people.

What did the team find? Well, putting aside (for now*) the judgements about “inappropriate responses” to examinations and “magnified illness behaviour” they found that people who were highly distressed demonstrated more of these “inappropriate” and “magnified” behaviours. Makes sense to me as it did to Waddell and colleagues – their analysis was “They may develop as a largely unconscious and socially productive ‘cry for help’ but, unfortunately, in the absence of due help they may, in themselves, add to disability and become counterproductive.”** The table below (from p. 212 of this paper) shows that physical impairment was the most significant contributor to disability.

But hold on a minute! In the prestigious Volvo Award winning paper, Waddell (1987) then shows a wonderful graphic that encapsulates just how complicated this relationship is. In it, he shows that “objective physical impairment” (remember this is in back pain) has a correlation of just r=0.27 with pain, and r=0.54 with disability, while the relationship between pain and disability was only r=0.44.

In other words, if pain and disability were directly related, there would need to have a relationship of 1:1 between pain intensity and functional limitations. There is not – so “other things” intrude or influence the relationship between pain and disability. Again in this paper, Waddell shows that there is little difference in pain intensity between people who go and see a health professional for low back pain, and those who don’t (and seeking healthcare is a pain-related behaviour, or illness behaviour) – because what we do about pain depends a great deal on what we think is going on, and on what we think a health professional can do for us.

Now because these papers are old, they’ll likely be discounted so I dipped into the enormous literature on pain and disability. I thought I’d ask if having a successful surgery that removed pain led to a “return to normal.” A 2010 paper by Bade et al., found that in knee replacement surgery “Compared to healthy older adults, patients performed significantly worse at all times for all measures (P<.05), except for single-limb stance time at 6 months (P>.05). One month postoperatively, patients experienced significant losses from preoperative levels in all outcomes. Patients recovered to preoperative levels by 6 months postoperatively on all measures, except knee flexion range of motion, but still exhibited the same extent of limitation they did prior to surgery.” So that’s a study using boring old functional assessments and disability measures: what if the person was getting surgery so they could do something they enjoy, perhaps golf? Jackson et al., (2009) found that only 57% of golfers returned to golf after total knee arthroplasty, with 81% golfing as often, or more, than before their surgery – but only 14% walked the course after surgery. And these were keen golfers with no pain after their knee replacements!

Kovaks et al., (2004) also found that “Clinically relevant improvements in pain may lead to almost unnoticeable changes in disability and quality of life. Therefore, these variables should be assessed separately when evaluating the effect of any form of treatment for low back pain.” The two important tables showing how correlations changed over time are below. On day 1, a 10% increase in VAS (ie pain intensity) increases disability by only 3.3%, and quality of life by 2.65%. On day 15, a 10% increase in VAS increases disability by 4.99% and quality of life by 3.8%.

Now I’m not reporting a large number of studies because – well, there are a LOT of them. Suffice to say that while there is a relationship between pain intensity and disability, it is not straightforward, and simply reducing pain does not mean a person will return to what they love doing, even golf! I’ve chosen older studies because it’s kinda helpful to look at older research to show that these ideas are not new. This poor relationship between pain intensity and function is something we should know already. We should have been taught this in our training. So catch up with the literature please!!

The factors that influence disability are many, and they’re not just biological. They include fears (of reinjury, of pain flare-up), they include other peoples’ responses to them (advice from health professionals, workplace requirements, family responses). They are real and mean that even once there is an effective treatment for forms of persistent pain (and we’ll be waiting a while for these), rehabilitation from a whole person perspective is crucial. In fact, in the golfing study, all the physical measures (strength, ROM etc) were fine – so it’s not about physical fitness, nor about pain intensity, it is about people being people. So we also need to be people working with other people.

*We cannot detect malingering in people with pain because we have no objective measure of pain. Psychometric measures don’t measure malingering (see Tuck, N. L., Johnson, M. H., & Bean, D. J. (2019). You’d Better Believe It: The Conceptual and Practical Challenges of Assessing Malingering in Patients With Chronic Pain. Journal of Pain, 20(2), 133-145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2018.07.002), and neither can we.

**For what it’s worth, if anyone suggests the “Waddell signs” can demonstrate who is malingering – go read Waddell’s own words, where he states unequivocally that these are indications only of psychological distress.

Bade, M. J., Kohrt, W. M., & Stevens-Lapsley, J. E. (2010). Outcomes before and after total knee arthroplasty compared to healthy adults. Journal of Orthopaedic Sports Physical Therapy, 40(9), 559-567. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2010.3317

Jackson, J. D., Smith, J., Shah, J. P., Wisniewski, S. J., & Dahm, D. L. (2009). Golf after total knee arthroplasty: do patients return to walking the course? American Journal of Sports Medicine, 37(11), 2201-2204. https://doi.org/10.1177/0363546509339009

Kovacs, F. M., Abraira, V., Zamora, J., Teresa Gil del Real, M., Llobera, J., Fernández, C., & Group, t. K.-A. P. (2004). Correlation Between Pain, Disability, and Quality of Life in Patients With Common Low Back Pain. Spine, 29(2), 206-210. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.Brs.0000107235.47465.08

Waddell, G., Main, C. J., Morris, E. W., Paola, M. D. I., & Gray, I. C. (1984). Chronic Low-Back Pain, Psychologic Distress, and Illness Behavior. Spine 9(2), 209-213.

Waddell, G. (1987). 1987 Volvo Award in Clinical Sciences: a new clinical model for the treatment of low-back pain. Spine, 12(7), 632-644.

On making things easier…Occupational therapists and ‘compensatory’ approaches

If there is one part of occupational therapy practice that gets more of my middle-aged grumpiness than any other, it’s occupational therapists using compensatory approaches for managing pain. And like anything, it’s complicated and nuanced. So here’s my attempt to work my way through the quagmire.

Compensatory approaches consist of a whole range of interventions that aim to “make up for” a deficit in a person’s occupational performance (see Nicholson & Hayward (2022) for a discussion of compensatory approaches in “functional neurological disorder”). The rationale for compensatory approaches is that by employing these strategies, a person is able to do what they need and want to do in daily life: the raison d’etre for occupational therapy (WFOT, 2012). End of story, right? If the person wants to be able to use the toilet independently, then a piece of equipment (a rail, a toilet seat, a long-handled wiper, easily removed and replaced clothing) makes sense, surely?

Short answer is no, not always. And long answer is – well, it depends.

First of all, let’s take a quick look at compensatory approaches used with people experiencing pain. Remember that people seeing occupational therapists may have acute post-surgical pain (eg post arthroplasty pain) or they may have long-term pain from conditions like osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis etc. In an acute hospital setting, it makes sense for someone to be helped to leave the hospital ward by providing them with a safe way to manage important daily life tasks such as using a toilet, shower/bath, getting dressed, making a meal. The intention behind using a compensatory approach is to give short-term strategies to foster independence, or to provide strategies to “make up for” functional deficits the person may never overcome.

The strategies can include adaptive equipment – I’ve mentioned the ubiquitous raised toilet seat and rails, but there are also chair raisers, bathboards, commodes, kitchen trolleys and so on. Strategies can also include “ergonomic”* approaches intended to reduce biomechanical demands, and often applied in the workplace such as adjustable office chairs, wrist rests, monitor height adjustment, sit/stand desks, lighting etc. Occupational therapists might discuss task simplification, where people are encouraged to consider whether a task needs to be done, needs to be done in a particular way, needs to be done right now, or needs to be done by that person. Activity pacing could be added to the list: choosing when and how to carry out various daily life tasks over the course of a day, a week, a month. So far, so good.

The problems arising from this approach lie in its long-term use, or use in a rehabilitation context. Let me unpack why.

In rehabilitation, our aims are to support a person to go through a process of change (relating to their health and the impact of a disease or disorder) that aims to enhance health outcomes including quality of life (Jehanne Dubouloz, et al., 2010). The person’s capabilities are in a state of flux during this process, and our intentions are (usually) to improve the person’s ability to do daily life tasks. Early rehabilitation might occur in a hospital setting, but generally the expectation is that the person will end up doing their daily life in their own context. In many cases, people don’t get admitted to a hospital, but receive all their rehabilitation as an outpatient, or in their own home.

In persistent pain management and rehabilitation, there are often two phases: 1) the secondary prevention phase, where the focus is on reducing or ameliorating the impact of pain on daily life and often focusing on reducing pain, increasing function, reducing healthcare use, reducing distress and enhancing quality of life. 2) the tertiary prevention phase, where the focus is less on reducing pain (although this is still part of the picture) and much more on helping the person do what matters in daily life in the presence of pain, increasing function, reducing healthcare use, reducing distress and enhancing quality of life. Good examples of occupational therapy for persistent pain are in the literature, although like most interventions, the results are equivocal (eg Nielsen, et al., 2021). The main distinction between these two phases lies in how much attention is paid to pain reduction or elimination. Perhaps this is where so many of our conversations about pain management and rehabilitation come unstuck, because the point at which we (the person and his or her clinician) discuss the likelihood of pain persisting despite all of our best efforts is pretty opaque. We simply don’t know, and we have very little to guide us, and furthermore, both clinicians and people living with pain are loath to talk about what is a highly challenging topic. More about that some other time!

For occupational therapists, offering compensatory equipment during the secondary prevention phase might be where we come unstuck. While they help the person do what matters to them, if they are not reviewed and gradually removed, they can foster remaining stuck with that technique or strategy with all its inherent limitations.

What are those limitations? Well, take the example of a raised toilet seat – great when it’s available for use in a person’s home, but pretty darned useless when that person is out doing the grocery shopping, visiting another family member, going to a restaurant or the cinema. Toilet seat raisers are not the easiest thing to carry around! Similarly with a cushion to make sitting easier: fabulous for reducing discomfort, but then you have to carry the thing around wherever you go!

My point is that when a person’s capabilities are changing, so must our solutions. Occupational therapists need to be responsive to changes in a person’s function, and change compensatory strategies accordingly. When this doesn’t occur, we risk working at odds with the rehabilitative approach used by other team members.

Am I saying don’t use compensatory approaches? Not at all! I’ll be very happy to use task simplification or a shower stool if I return home following hip or knee arthroplasty. And if my cognitive capabilities are limited as they were when I had post-concussion syndrome, I’m very happy to incorporate activity management, fatigue management and compensatory ‘aide memoirs’ (my ever-handy lists and diary!) as part of my life – until I don’t need them any more. Thankfully I had great therapists who helped fade or withdraw the range of compensatory supports I used as my recovery progressed.

Soon I’ll be writing about a framework occupational therapists (and other rehabilitation and pain management clinicians) can use to review their therapeutic approaches. In the meantime, it’s crucial for occupational therapists to take the time to understand the factors contributing to a person’s difficulty doing daily life. If those factors are able to be changed, and if the context is not constrained by “we must get this person out of hospital”, then perhaps we need to stop and think carefully about when, where and whether a compensatory approach is useful.

*I use the term “ergonomic” in quotes because technically, ergonomic approaches are not just about office equipment, but is actually a larger and almost philosophical practice of ensuring that work fits the person/humans doing the tasks. It sprang from work undertaken during the Second World War when it was found that dashboards on aeroplanes, and the machines that fabricated parts for them, did not work for most people. Essentially, it is a systems-based approach to ensuring human capabilities and limitations are considered during the design of workplaces to minimise errors, maximise productivity, reduce cognitive load, and enhance performance.

Jehanne Dubouloz, C., King, J., Ashe, B., Paterson, B., Chevrier, J., & Moldoveanu, M. (2010). The process of transformation in rehabilitation: what does it look like?. International Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation, 17(11), 604-615.

Nicholson, C., Hayward, K. (2022). Occupational Therapy: Focus on Function. In: LaFaver, K., Maurer, C.W., Nicholson, T.R., Perez, D.L. (eds) Functional Movement Disorder. Current Clinical Neurology. Humana, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86495-8_24

Nielsen, S. S., Christensen, J. R., Søndergaard, J., Mogensen, V. O., Enemark Larsen, A., Skou, S. T., & Simonÿ, C. (2021). Feasibility assessment of an occupational therapy lifestyle intervention added to multidisciplinary chronic pain treatment at a Danish pain centre: a qualitative evaluation from the perspectives of patients and clinicians. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, 16(1), 1949900.

World Federation of Occupational Therapists. Statement of occupational therapy. 2012. http://www.wfot.org/about-occupational-therapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My guidelines for working through “pain mechanisms”?

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

What to do instead of explaining mechanisms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The social” – a brief look at family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways to stop good clinicians leaving pain management (i)

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

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

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

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

Funders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biopsychological pain management is not enough

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

Nicholas declares, too:

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

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

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

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

An example might help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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