What to do when one size does not fit all

Alert: rant ahead. Early in my career working in persistent pain management, it was thought that “chronic pain is chronic pain is chronic pain” and pretty much anything that helped one person would help the next. Over time we’ve learned a lot more about persistent pain: the mechanisms differ a lot between neuropathic mechanisms and nociplastic mechanisms. Even within these groups, the mechanisms are very different. We’ve also learned a lot more about the psychosocial variables that are associated with prolonged disability and distress when pain persists. Some of the earliest work by Turk and colleagues found that by using the Westhaven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory, people could be classified into four subgroups (Kerns, Turk & Rudy, 1985). While the names of these subgroups could do with some updating (to avoid negative labelling), there’s a large body of research supporting the four groups they found. When I first worked at Burwood Pain Management Centre, the WHYMPI was the workhorse pre-assessment questionnaire used to help clinicians understand more about the person they were seeing. Interestingly, at the time there were two group programmes on offer: one was the three week full time residential pain management programme, and people who were admitted to this programme were those with high levels of distress and disability, often with very unhelpful beliefs about their pain, and needing the intensity of the full-time programmin...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Groupwork Interdisciplinary teams Pain conditions Research Science in practice Source Type: blogs