“ … someone needs to find the cause of my pain, then fix it. ” What to do with sticky beliefs

I think most clinicians, and certainly a lot of people living with pain, want to know ‘what’s going on’ – with the hope that, once identified, ‘something’ can be done. Tricky stuff to navigate both as a person living with pain, and as a clinician – because for so many chronic pains, a diagnosis does very little. Having a label has some benefits, for sure: it acts as a short-hand when talking about what’s going on with others; it can validate that the mysterious problems a person has been having are ‘real’ (though I could say more about that!); it can help people find others with similar problems; and there’s always hope that by giving the problem a name it might lead to effective treatment. In the case of pains involving neuropathic or nociplastic mechanisms however, effective therapies are few, far between, and not terribly effective. From a clinician’s perspective one of the most challenging situations is knowing what to do when someone is really convinced that there is a ‘something’ to be found, because many know how little diagnoses actually help. After all, each person with ‘lateral elbow pain’ might have pain in their lateral elbow, but how it affects them differs wildly depending on what they want to, and need to do in daily life. For the person with pain who knows their own body and knows what their ‘normal’ feels like, finding the cause seems utterly...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: ACT - Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Coping strategies Occupational therapy Physiotherapy Professional topics Psychology Research Science in practice biopsychosocial pain management Therapeutic appr Source Type: blogs