PAIN MANAGEMENT COACHING

​

What do Pain Specialist Coaches Do?
Pain specialist coaches utilize a multifaceted approach to pain treatment and management that can be broken up into multiple areas of focus:

Essential Pain Education
Pain specialist coaches approach education-based care from the context of two critical associations identified in people living with chronic pain: low health literacy and maladaptive pain beliefs. Pain education works to alleviate both of these issues by helping the patient develop a strong understanding of the neurobiology and neurophysiology of pain and pain processing by the nervous system and brain. The goal of this approach is the “reconceptualization” of pain. This reconceptualization shifts the perception of pain from a single biomedical cause to a multicomponent biopsychosocial condition. In turn, it positively impacts three critical mediators of chronic pain; fear-avoidance, pain catastrophizing, and kinesiophobia.

These changes are fundamental to the improvement of the patient as they allow the patient to make informed decisions about their health and lifestyle habits rather than follow generalized guidelines for people with chronic pain.
For example, a common misconception is that a patient’s chronic pain is caused mainly by damaged tissues. This leads to fear of movement as patients do not want to exacerbate the issue.

However, in many cases chronic pain stems from oversensitive nerves, or central sensitization. In these situations it is crucial for patients to resume normal activity levels in order to re-train the nervous system and ultimately lessen chronic pain symptoms.

Behavioral Change Techniques
Education alone, while crucial to the overall success of a pain specialist coach, is not enough to facilitate the behavior change necessary to overcome chronic pain and improve a patient’s quality of life. For this reason, pain specialist coaches also make extensive use of behavioral change techniques including motivational interviewing, coaching sessions, and evidence-based health and lifestyle interventions. These techniques work together to provide patients with the tools to make lasting change in their own lives as well as consistent support and the motivation required to use them. 

Behavioral change therapy also keeps treatment centered on the patient rather than the coach, which is crucial to the outcome of treatment. Instead of simply administering a cure, pain specialist coaches work with the patient to attack the root causes of their individual chronic pain symptoms.

This again helps the patient to reconceptualize the role they play in their pain and teaches them that they have a larger degree of control over their pain than they may have realized.