Your patient has psychosocial risk factors: what now?

Congratulations! You’re an insightful clinician who’s offered your patient a screening assessment to find out if she or he has psychosocial risk factors – and yes! they do! Well done. Now what? Do you… send your patient to the nearest psychologist?spend at least one treatment session offering pain neurobiology education?scramble to find a “psychologically informed physio” to send them to, because it takes really highly trained and special clinicians to work with these peoplegive your patient the same exercise prescription you were going to anyway because, after all, they still have things going on in their tissues (or is it their nervous system? I forget – whatever, they just need to move, dammit!)throw your hands up in horror and say “I never wanted to deal with people in pain anyway!” You’d have to be hiding beneath a rock to avoid learning that people with musculoskeletal pain with psychosocial risk factors such as feeling that back pain is terrible and it isn’t going to get better, believing that it’s not safe to move or exercise with back pain, having worrying thoughts going through their mind, or not enjoying things very much should have special attention when they seek help for their pain. And we’ve all read studies showing that many of our frontline clinicians who see people with musculoskeletal pain aren’t comfortable, confident or clear about what to do with people who are, ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Back pain Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Occupational therapy Pain conditions Physiotherapy Professional topics Psychology Research Science in practice biopsychosocial healthcare pain management Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs