Pain care at Lifemark – aligning with science and the Canadian Pain Task Force

Jacklyn, who you met in our last blog, has now found health professionals who understand that pain and disability do not always resolve as quickly as they are supposed to.

She is relieved to not feel it is her fault and happy to receive guidance and treatment to help her move with more ease.

On the other hand, she is struggling with the idea of pain management. Like many people, Jaklyn has questions like these:

• Can therapeutic exercise and self-care techniques actually help the pain?
   
• If self-care is so important and effective, why did no one suggest this at the start?

She was told to exercise more, but no one told her that movement and self-care can be modified so they are effective in changing pain. Even though she trusts her health professionals, this is still hard to believe.

The stigma of persisting pain

Research tells us that the dominant societal stigma around pain is that if you are not getting better, it is probably your fault. These misconceptions are difficult to change, here are a few others:

• If you were just tough enough you would be better.
   
• If you cannot do the exercises, you are lazy and don’t want to get better or don’t want to get back to work.|
   
• If there is no good medical explanation of why you are not improving, the pain cannot be real and you are intentionally making it all up.

These harsh misguided views are commonly the source of shame in people with persisting pain. Imagine if Jaklyn had lived her life thinking these exact things about people with chronic pain.

Even though she no longer believes it is true, these powerful beliefs could create doubts within any of us, such as, “am I really just weak, and cannot admit it?”

If you are like Jaklyn, you need to find a professional with expert knowledge about pain who knows this is not true and knows how to help.

Self-care can be an effective pain management strategy

Jaklyn’s concerns about the effectiveness of self-care make sense. She was told that the solution to her pain involved a medical assessment and treatment. When that didn't help her, clinicians began to talk to her about adding a greater focus on self-care to her treatment plan.

The problem is that we are often looking for “the one thing” that will help with the pain rather than considering how to layer different treatments together to get the best effect.

Effective pain care is often multimodal – requiring more than one type of treatment. We are learning that self-care is an important part of effective care, and that it should begin early in treatment rather than added later.

We believe, like the Pain Task Force, that education around self-care should be improved. Often, the powerful benefits of pain self-care practices are not a part of healthcare education and does not focus enough on how we can support patients in their health journeys.

How we are addressing important pain issues

The best antidote to stigma is knowledge. The Canadian Pain Task Force is recommending enhancements to the university education of health professionals and to their continuing education.

At Lifemark, our focus on increasing the knowledge of our health professionals, specifically about helping people with persistent pain, ramped up 2.5 years ago.

• We have a multi-tiered education approach, with online education for all our staff to help them understand people in pain, and provide innovative care to people when pain doesn’t resolve as usual.
   
• We provide workshops for all our staff, giving them an opportunity to learn how to apply this new knowledge to difficult clinical situations.
   
• We have a mentorship program in which a strong, passionate group of clinicians across the country support each other, share research and clinical innovations, and provide ongoing training to our staff.

Self-care needs to start at the beginning

Research shows us that a thorough biomedical evaluation and instructions in self-care should be completed as soon as any individual is not recovering as usual.

Pain self-care should not be relegated to something we do when all the medical tests and interventions have been unsuccessful.

At Lifemark, we have developed many pain self-care resources and programs, such as:

• Handouts to increase your understanding of persisting pain
   
• An introduction to pain self-care through our open access online program called First 5 Steps.
   
• An extensive pain self-care online platform with over 60 self-care lessons called Pain Care for Life.

For many years, specialized interdisciplinary pain management programs with highly trained health professionals have successfully treated people with complex pain problems.

Our focus now is on prevention and providing evidence-based treatment when pain starts to persist. Our education programs teach clinicians how to identify persisting pain early.

This way, Jaklyn can receive the best care possible as soon as possible, rather than being referred out to a long waiting list for a pain management program.

If you are looking for help managing pain, book an appointment online or look for a clinic near you.