Unpalatable truths about pain

Recently I read a blog post about the way “Explain pain” had landed with a group of people in the general public. The point being made was that people found the ideas presented unpalatable. They didn’t agree with the points and they thought the ideas were dismissive of their experience. Now I am a critic of any recipe-based approach to helping people. I am especially a critic of clinicians using something they’ve picked up on a weekend course, or out of a book, being applied holus bolus to an individual without nuance. There have been outrageous claims made about the effectiveness of giving someone information and reducing their pain – and absolutely no doubt that not experiencing pain reduction for people living with pain who have had this sort of message handed to them is more than a slap in the face. But…. there are many unpalatable truths about pain that both clinicians and people living with pain find incredibly difficult to swallow. Here are a few I’ve learned over my 30 year career. The amount of HURT experienced doesn’t correlate well with the degree of tissue damage. It’s true that there is a small and complex relationship between tissue damage and pain intensity, but it’s complex! This complexity begins with sex differences in the way humans process nociception, and goes on from there…(Presto et al., 2022) There are two groups of pain disorders for which we have very little to offer for ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Pain conditions Professional topics biopsychosocial pain management Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs