Do you trust me?

Trust – something that needs to be earned, or something that is present at first… and then erodes? Or perhaps, it’s a snap judgement we make on the fly – and judge everything else about a person on that basis? Firstly, why even discuss trustworthiness in pain rehabilitation? Well, the answer is quite clear: I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked if I can tell whether someone is faking their pain. I’ve read numerous articles on functional capacity testing – and its poor predictive validity (or completely absent investigation of such properties). I’ve had case managers tell me they have a method for testing whether someone is faking or malingering… so trustworthiness is something those in the insurance industry seem to want to test. The same kinds of questions are made by employers: how can I tell whether this person is really that bad? When we don’t believe someone, or we think they’re exaggerating, our level of empathy for that person drops, and our tendency to question their honesty increases (Ashton-James & Nicholas, 2016; Schafer, Prkachin, Kaseweter & Williams, 2016). As a result, people who don’t fit our preconceived ideas of who should or shouldn’t deserve empathy are stigmatised (De Ruddere & Craig, 2016; Stensland & Sanders, 2018). Stigma means people may not receive adequate analegsia (Wilbers, 2015), they may present as stoic and prefer not to reveal how th...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Coping strategies Pain conditions Professional topics Science in practice empathy malingering stereotypes stigma trust trustworthiness Source Type: blogs