Chronic Pain Presentation

I'm so fortunate to work for Seattle Children's Hospital in their Sports Physical Therapy Department. There are lots of reasons why- awesome coworkers, creative scheduling that allows for optimal time with patients and their parents, getting to play with kids all day... you get the picture.

But one of the best benefits has been their dedication to practitioner learning. As a group we go through MedBridge courses annualy, but we also participate in group projects including research and speakers are brought in for in-services at regular intervals. Today was our quarterly in-service with a chronic pain focus delivered by three impressive presenters. 

First, Dr. Emily Law, PhD provided the cognitive-behavioral perspective for working with chronic pain patients.  Read her bio... this lady is the bees knees when it comes to childhood headaches and chronic pain.  Continuing the powerful lady presenter trend were physical therapists Janet Morton of Seattle Children's Hospital and Ellie Somers of Sisu Sports Performance.  This duo described the pain science model a la Butler and Moseley with tools for physical therapists and clinicians to utilize. 

Key take away messages in the presentation:

1) Pain needs to be considered from the biopsychosocial perspective. This correlates with the learning from the hip hinge blog post I recently wrote where Clint Dempsey hypothetically injured his ankle... the multiple facets involved in the pain experience. 

2) Pain is one of many outputs from your body in response to various sensory inputs. It is a normal response that is useful for the body to identify potential danger. Sometimes this system functions improperly and results in the need for reprogramming- thus the need to learn Pain science. 

3) Chronic pain is optimally treated by a multidisciplinary approach including numerous practitioners utilizing consistent messages to educate the patient and improve their independence in managing their symptoms.

4) The language that practitioners utilize when interacting with patients and their families can significantly impact their pain experience and their outcomes. Consider your words wisely to make the patient feel safe and hopeful rather than endangered and doomed.  For example- when finding weakness in a patient evaluation, instead of saying they are weak, we can say we will work to make them stronger. Empower the patients!

5) Exercise is vital to recovery in this patient populism. Graded progression of activity is needed to return these patients back to activities though they may continue experiencing pain. 

6) New books for my to-read list: "Explain Pain, Supercharged" by Butler and Moseley and "Managing your Child's Chronic Pain" - by Dr Emily Law. 

I'm midway through a publication by Moseley and will likely write another Blog post on that piece when I get through it.  Chronic pain looks to be a hot topic right now and since I have a few patients with chronic pain on my caseload, it's likely going to be a recurring topic on the blog for the foreseeable future.  

Anybody else read "Explain Pain Supercharged?"