Not all pain is the same

When I started working in the field of persistent pain, many of the approaches used were based on the idea that every pain was the same. Oh yes, of course we had neuropathic pain and inflammatory pain, but our treatments tended to approach each person as if they were pretty similar. We later refined that approach and started to look at people in groups. In the service I worked in, we used the Westhaven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory which generates three main psychologically-based profiles – and for a long time this was a very useful way of establishing who needed the three-week residential programme, and who would do well with a briefer outpatient programme. Well things change over time, and we’ve become more aware of what Clifford Woolf describes as a “mechanism-based” classification approach (Woolf, 2004). In this approach, clinicians try to establish the dominant mechanistic group in which a person’s pain might be classified, then suit the treatment to that mechanism. This means clinicians diagnose inflammatory pain, neuropathic pain, and nociplastic pain – and use what looks like the best combination of medications to suit the mechanisms. For example, for neuropathic pain it’s more likely people will be given gabapentin/pregabalin and a tricyclic antidepressant in combination than an opioid. There’s a problem, though – in fact, TWO problems I can see. Methods for identifying pain mechanistic groups ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Pain conditions Professional topics Research Science in practice Source Type: blogs