The gap in managing pain

If you’ve read my blog for any period of time you’ll know that I like practical research, and research that helps clinicians do what they do with humanity, compassion and evidence. One really enormous gap in the field is rarely mentioned: how do clinicians pull their assessment findings together and use them for clinical reasoning? Especially if you’re part of an interprofessional team (or work in a biopsychosocial framework). The silence in the pain literature is deafening! There are any number of articles on what can be included in an initial assessment, most of them based on the idea that if factor X is an important predictor, it oughta be assessed. So we have a proliferation of assessments across (mainly) the biopsychological spectrum, with a teeny tiny bit of social (family relationships) thrown in, if you’re lucky. There are numerous papers proposing treatments for aspects of pain – anything from medications, to movement treatments, to cognitive treatments (yes, pain education), and behavioural treatments – but after reading them it almost feels like authors think anyone with pain that’s going on longer than we’d hope “should” have That Treatment, and then of course the person will be just fine. Except that – there are just as many people with persistent pain today as there were 20 years ago, perhaps more (given the global burden of disease shows that low back pain is The Most Common problem associated w...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Interdisciplinary teams Pain conditions Professional topics Research Science in practice biopsychosocial pain management rehabilitation Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs