How to Reduce Your Patients Chronic Pain: Recent Episodes
George Beilin
How your patients' choose to handle their chronic pain is up to them, even if it is against medical advice (albeit not when in danger against self or others) or not the best ways from a range of alternatives. Patients will differ in the ways they choose because they are at different stages of change. Instead of simply giving advice, try to understand what works for your patients and why!
Fact #8: Your Patients differ in their Motivation to Change- The Action and Maintenance Stages of Change. In this podcast, I address the critical ways to help your patient whn they act on their commitments and when they are looking long-term to sustain reduced levels of pain over time.
Fact #8: Patients Differ in Their Motivation to Change: The Preparation Stage You can empower your patients by helping them set S.M.A.R.T. goals or ones that are Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Results oriented and Time-bound.
In this podcast, I review the nature of your patients' ambivalence or uncertainty about changing their ways to reduce their pain. lt is critical to not give advice at this stage! It is much better for you or someone on your patients' pain management team review the costs and benefits of using the same ways to reduce your patients' pain.
Fact #7: Pain is Multi-dimensional. Of course, there are physical experiences of pain unique to each patient. But what about their pain from life stressors, or anger, sadness, anxety or unhappiness, or negative thinking, or from a lack of fortitude?
Fact #8: Each patient differs in their motivation to change. A patient Tin the pre-contemplative stage of change is in denial and believes that their way of dealing with their pain is sufficient. They may be reluctant, resistant, rebellious or replete with rationalizing. What you need to do to help this patient is not to simply give advice, be judgmental or lecture. This will lead to treatment nonadherence.
Fact 6: Some coping strategies are better than others. Fact 7: Your patients must let go of the way they were before having chronic pain.
Each patient with chronic pain is different. As well, your patients may always have chronic pain; especially if we're reframing chronic pain as "ongoing, intermittent life challenges." Who then, never experiences chronic pain?
There are ten facts about chronic pain that you should know about when treating patients with chronic pain. In this podvast, I review the first two: 1. Chronic pain isn't new-the intensity of the pain is , 2. Pain is subjective
Members of the primary pain managent team include the primary care physician, the clinical nurse practitioner, the physician assistant and a mental health clinician trained to help the patient work through ways to establish a "Pain Manaement Lifestyle" over time.
It is critical for you, as a healthcare provider, to realize that each patient's pereption of their pain is unique no matter what the diagnosis. As well, you can relieve your burden of conern about reducing your patients' pain by knowing where they are in their motivation to change; by realizing that there isn't one main solution to eliminating your patents' chronic pain and that there are many alternatives to prescribing opiate medications; and by knowing that you can empower your patients to take more responsibility to use different strategies and to self-manage their pain levels over time.
How have the changing healthcare demands impacted the level of professional 'pain' you've experienced in trying to practice offensive, rather than defensive, medicine?
In this podcast, I address the first part of te rationale of why I wrote this handbook for healthcare providers who treat patients with chronic pain
The Intent of these podcasts is to reduce your stress and prevent burnout from treating patients having chronic pain. You will learn how to rely less on prescribed opiate medications as treatments for chronic pain.