Below are seven strategic steps that I believe are necessary for people living with chronic pain to learn in order to overcome obstacles for obtaining appropriate and effective pain management.  The rational and more in depth explanation for each of the following steps can be found in my new book The Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide

1. Developing an Initial Multidisciplinary Pain Management Plan:  The first step of effective pain management is utilizing a multidisciplinary assessment protocol.  The patient needs to objectively examine their current pain management program.  They should list each of the medications and non-pharmacological pain management interventions they are currently using and answer pertinent questions about each one. They also need to list their professional and personal support system, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each.
2. Looking At Pain Objectively:  This component explores how to increase the patients’ understanding of their pain and how to use that knowledge to improve their pain management.  They need to learn the different aspects of pain—acute and chronic—and the bio-psycho-social components of pain as well as the difference between pain and suffering.  They should learn about the stress-pain connection and how to rate their stress and pain levels accurately.  Finally they need to explore how their thinking, emotions, behaviors, and social relationships change when they’re having a “bad” pain day.
3. Understanding and Managing Depression: Since depression frequently affects people in chronic pain, in this component patients need objective and easy to understand information about depression and what constitutes effective depression management.  They should learn how to accurately rate the type and level of depression symptoms they experience and then develop their own personal six-step depression management plan.
4. Exploring Effective Use of Medication: This component starts with educating patients about some common, and possibly misunderstood, terms like medication abuse, dependency, pseudo addiction, and addiction.  Patients need to learn how to use a Red Flags checklist to see if they have a problematic relationship with their pain medication.  They also need to learn the role of denial and finally explore the benefits and disadvantages of using appropriate pain medication.
5. Developing An Effective Pain Management Plan: In this component patients are exposed to the concept of a Pain Management Agreement and how to deal with urges/cravings that could tempt them to use pain medication in an inappropriate manner. They should develop a nonpharmacological (non-medication) pain management plan and learn to utilize a pain journaling process to increase their pain management skills.
6. Exploring Biological versus Psychological/Emotional Symptoms:  This component focuses on explaining ascending versus descending pain signals and exploring and scoring the patients’ biological and psychological/emotional pain symptoms.  Patients also need to look at how their TFUARs (thinking, feeling, urges, actions, and social reactions) change on a bad pain day and how to manage their TFUARs more effectively.
7. Finalizing Your Pain Management Plan:  This component ties everything together by teaching patients to identify and rate their bio-psycho-social-spiritual pain management goals.  Then they should learn how to improve their existing pain management foundation and test this new plan to make sure it is effective.

To learn more about developing your own chronic pain management plan please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Publications page and check out my book The Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. If you want to read more about chronic pain management you can find my article The Right to Quality Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

To check out our July Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here.

I’ve been living with my chronic pain condition for over 25 years and have learned that pain flare ups are inevitable for me.  I woke up this morning with a major pain flare up and was forced once again to “practice what I preached” and had to implement my own pain flare up plan.  As I did this I began thinking that this would be a good time to once again blog about managing pain flare ups.

There’s an exercise in my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Workbook designed to help people manage pain flare ups. If you’d like to obtain a free copy of this exercise please go to our Contact Us page at http://www.addiction-free.com/contact.html to request my Pain Flare Up Plan and we will be happy to email it to you. In the meantime I want to share very briefly some of that exercise below.

Following are six of the hundreds of possible non-pharmacological (non-medication) ways that other people have learned in order to manage their pain flare-ups.  The important thing to remember is you can intervene in a way that helps you regain effective pain management.  Sometimes the intervention does need to be pain medication, but changing your medication protocols should only be done with your health care provider’s knowledge and permission.

1. Relaxation and Stress Reduction
2. Increasing Activity and Fitness
3. Reducing Emotional Reactivity
4. External Focusing and Distraction
5. Ice and/or Heat
6. Hydrotherapy

To learn more about developing your own chronic pain management plan please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Publications page and check out my book The Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. If you want to learn more about coping with emotional reactivity for chronic pain management flare ups you can find my article Pain Versus Suffering that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

To check out our July Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here.

In the not so recent past pain management providers did not for the most part attempt to understand or treat the emotional components of chronic pain.  Fortunately we’ve come a long way and today most pain management providers see the importance addressing the whole person biologically, psychologically (thoughts and emotions), socially and even spiritually.  When I work with people I help them differentiate between pain and suffering—physiological symptoms versus psychological/emotional symptoms.
 
Today I found an article by Salynn Boyles titled Emotions May Influence Arthritis Pain and wanted to share some of it below.  If you want to read the entire article please click here.

The fear and distress arthritis patients feel about their condition can make a big difference in how they perceive the pain that comes with it, a novel brain-imaging study shows.  The findings suggest that interventions designed to reduce pain-related fear and anxiety, such as [cognitive] behavioral therapy, should play a bigger role in the treatment of chronic arthritis pain, the study’s researcher tells WebMD.

The study by Jones and colleagues from the University of Manchester Rheumatic Diseases Center is the first to directly examine how the brain processes arthritis pain using a specific type of brain imaging.

“Most arthritis patients don’t have access to these types of therapies, or if they do, they tend to get them after they have lived with pain for many years,” says neuro-rheumatologist Anthony K.P. Jones, MD. “We believe patients would fare better if they were treated with these therapies much earlier.”

The study by Jones and colleagues from the University of Manchester Rheumatic Diseases Center is the first to directly examine how the brain processes arthritis pain using a specific type of brain imaging.

Two parallel areas within the brain have been identified as pain processing centers — the lateral system and the medial system. While both systems share many of the same functions, earlier work by the University of Manchester research team identified the medial system as being more involved in the emotional aspects of pain, such as fear and stress.

To learn more about chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Publications page and check out my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. If you want to learn more about emotions and chronic pain management you can find my article Pain Versus Suffering that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

To check out our July Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here.