Big questions in pain rehabilitation

The last 30 years or more of pain research and management have been exciting for us pain nerds. We’ve learned so much about processes involved in nociception, about the psychology of our responses to nociceptive input, about treatments (that often don’t work terribly well), and we’ve discovered that we (mainly) don’t know what we don’t know. There are some big questions though, that have yet to be answered – and don’t yet share the limelight that neurobiological processes seem to hog. Here are a few of my big questions. How do we alter public health policy to move from an acute biomedical model to the broader and more adequate biopsychosocial understanding of illness, as opposed to disease? To expand on this – our current healthcare funding targets procedures, actions taken against “diseases” like an osteoarthritic knee that can be whipped out and replaced with a shiny new one. The person living with that knee doesn’t really feature because what matters is getting rid of a waiting list of people who want new knees. Government funding is allocated to ensure X number of knees are replaced with the unquestioned belief that this is the best way to deal with osteoarthritic knees. Rehabilitation, or the process of helping a person deal with the effect of a disease on their experience (ie illness), is, by comparison, poorly funded, and the outcomes rather more uncertain and complex. It’s hard to count outcome...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Motivation Pain conditions Professional topics Science in practice questions Source Type: blogs