Health Psychology Services For Chronic Pain
You have likely tried a full range of medical interventions for pain before considering how a health psychologist might be helpful to you. Most people who come to us for help with pain management have tried many options for pain relief before we meet them. Health psychology can add a powerful dimension to your treatment that allows you to change your experience of pain.
Pain is one of the most compelling and disruptive experiences humans can have. It is what interrogators use to break one's spirit. So, it should be no surprise that pain has you thinking, feeling and doing things that you would normally never do.
As a way of understanding how a health psychologist can be helpful to you, we'd like you to understand how pain affects people and how the health care delivery system typically responds.
Like a powerful magnet, pain draws your attention and can dominate your life experience.
It makes good sense to seek relief from medical doctors who are trained and committed to relieving people of their pain and suffering. Doctors are eager to reduce or eliminate the source of the pain and to reduce the suffering. The typical medical approach uses medicine, physical therapy and surgery. This is the biomedical approach. When it works, it is wonderful.
But once pain becomes chronic, a different pattern most often emerges. The impact of chronic pain can seep into all facets of daily living, disrupting your normal activities, your relationships, your sleep, your thought processes, your mood, and your self-esteem. It is not uncommon for people with chronic pain to feel as if they are no longer the same person and that their life has been destroyed.
The experience can be so powerful that it triggers desperation in the search for relief. As with any stressful experience there is a natural narrowing of focus resulting in a decreased awareness of options.
The result too often is that people get stuck in one or more of the following patterns:
- Taking increasing amounts and types of prescribed medicine
- greater willingness to elect one of the high risk/low success surgical procedures
- using non-prescribed illicit drugs and alcohol
- indulging in smoking and excessive eating
Even though pain specialists understand these patterns, are aware of how pain affects the patient's life and how the disruptions to one's life affect pain, this downward spiral can be difficult to alter.
First, it is not the medical doctor's job to deal with the psychological side of pain. Second, they are generally not trained to deal with it. Third, they must devote their time to what they do best, which is the practice of medicine. And, fourth, when doctors do recommend working with a psychologist, patients tend to misperceive this to mean that the doctor thinks the pain is not real, that it is "all in your head."
Discouraged and still hurting, the patient often seeks another doctor to relieve them of their pain.
When this process goes on uninterrupted, people are likely to slip further into the patterns described above and into lives of quiet desperation and depression.
By integrating health psychology services into your existing treatment regimen you can interrupt these negative spirals and regain a sense of control over your life, modify the experience of your pain, and reduce the impact of the pain on your life.
THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL OF PAIN MANAGEMENT
The very unfortunate troublesome patterns described above can be understood by realizing that they are a bi-product of an old model of understanding pain and its treatment.
An historical perspective shows that there has been a shift in the models for health and illness, especially in the last 30 years. Our understanding has moved from a purely Biomedical model to the Biopsychosocial model, which is more comprehensive.
The Biopsychosocial Model integrates psychological, social, and cultural factors with biological factors in the understanding and treatment of pain.
This model explains how the same exact injury or medical problem is not experienced exactly the same by different individuals. The biological malady always interacts with the meaning it has for the individual and their natural reactions to stress.
The following list describes the core methods we will teach you in order to improve your management of pain.
- Basic self care for managing pain and maintaining healthy functioning
- How to monitor physical symptoms (e.g., pain and muscle tension) and psychological symptoms (e.g., emotions, mood, and thoughts)
- Relaxation methods to interrupt the physical stress reaction and ease your body into a calmer more relaxed state
- Cognitive methods to interrupt troublesome thoughts and to replace them with thoughts that allow you to take back control
- How to use biofeedback and/or hypnosis to alter your pain experience
- Communication skills to improve your relationships with and to get your needs met from loved ones and health care providers
- How to develop and sustain a physical therapy program
Health Psychology Services
We offer several interrelated services.
Individual Therapy
Individual sessions provide the continuing support and guidance you will need beyond the group. You will receive individualized training in self-regulation, biofeedback and hypnosis for pain alteration.
Family Counseling
Adjunctive family counseling provides you and your family the opportunity to identify primary issues/challenges for your family that your chronic pain has created. The sessions will provide guidelines to your family for the objectives of the pain program, the type of support your family can provide, and guidelines for minimizing enabling behaviors.
To schedule an individual appointment call Dr. Michael Kahn at 410-647-8840.