“Collaborative care” helps in chronic pain

Living with chronic pain, non-cancer pain, often causes other problems besides the pain itself. These problems can range from physical issues, such as overusing one side of the body to protect the other, to psychological issues, such as depression, to social issues, such as isolation.

Chronic pain is also extremely difficult to treat in most cases. Acute pain is caused – usually – by an identifiable source and is fixable. This includes a broken bone, an incision from surgery, a toothache. But chronic pain is not as easily identified, not as specific, and often not fixable.

A new study, published in the latest issue of JAMA, has found that people living with chronic pain who took part in a collaborative care approach (patient and clinician education with symptom monitoring and feedback to the primary care physician) showed improvements in lowering the intensity of pain and pain-related disability, more so than did patients who received so-called “usual care.” This, depending on the type of pain, usually involves medications, maybe surgery, physiotherapy, and so on.

This finding was also seen among patients who had depression along with or as a result of their chronic pain.

You can read more about this interesting study in the journal’s press release, Program helps improve management of chronic pain.

Do you live with chronic pain? What have you tried to help it?

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