What are the most commonly used pain self-management strategies?

In a very unscientific vox populi survey conducted via my blog, I asked people with pain to tell me the FIVE self-management strategies they’d used over the week prior. If you’re interested in completing this yourself, click here: click. (Scroll down that page to the survey). My reason for asking the question is that we have a list of self-management strategies, but the definitions and the way strategies are used in daily life are quite murky. For example, we don’t have a clear definition of ‘activity pacing’ though we are starting to investigate it. We also don’t know whether strategies introduced during a pain management programme are those that get carried on over time. We know that movement practices are common, but we’re not certain what forms of movement practice are carried out over a lifetime – and many people living with persisting pain will need to use strategies over a lifetime. My survey results are below, and I’ll unpack them a bit today. Now the survey didn’t ask people any details about what these strategies look like, apart from the examples I listed, so I’m drawing on my experiences working with people living well with pain when I talk about them. No surprises, movement practices come out on top. This is such a broad church of activities! In my PhD study, I found that movement practices were mainly woven into daily life. Things like walking or cycling to work, walking on the bea...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Coping strategies Research Resilience/Health pain management Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs