The Empowered Pain Patient: How Validated Pain Management Can Work for You by Kim Kristiansen

Author:Kim Kristiansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Empowered Pain Patient

It is time we skip the traditional, paternalistic physician-centered care for ongoing and chronic conditions and turn to a kind of care where the patient is an active participant in interpretation, goal setting, and evaluation. We are all individuals and the only ones who know how we are actually feeling and what we want.

With acute conditions like a broken leg, a myocardial infarction, or appendicitis, of course we shouldn’t argue about what actions to take (few probably would want to). However, with chronic or long-term conditions, things are different. Better treatment for many diseases and general better health means that many people live longer with conditions that previously led to an early death. Chronic pain might accompany such conditions, but for the huge number of people living with chronic pain, many factors can be involved. Frankly, we do not know if our recording of pain problems is better now, if it is just more acceptable to talk about experiencing pain, if today’s life is higher pressure, or if a combination of these and other, perhaps unknown factors that have led to the high count of those living with chronic pain today. But it is a fact that around 25 to 35 percent of the Western population lives with chronic pain.

Living with a long-term condition like chronic pain means that there is no clear hope for a cure and that the experience could last a long time. It affects everyday life and will continue to do so. This adds a dimension to health care professionals’ medical knowledge—the patient’s experience now and preferences for the future—and helps them to understand the pain. Everyone’s life contains happiness and sorrow, preferences and goals, values and expectations, family and work, social communities and interactions, and much, much more. All of these affect our feelings and our health. These important factors must be added to the medical knowledge provided by clinicians to set goals and make decisions.

A clinician is the expert on medical knowledge, and the patient is the expert on his or her own life. Each clinical encounter must be a conference between these two experts. We call that shared decision making, an enhancement of the more often used term patient-centered care. For these discussions to be of value, the patient must be honest with feelings and experiences, and the health care professional must listen and address the individual’s statements and concerns. If a patient claims to be in pain, it is not enough to check blood pressure, lab results, or to prescribe yet another X-ray. Rather, the doctor must listen, address, and interact. Shared decision making is a collaborative process that allows patients and their clinicians to make health care decisions together, taking into account the best scientific evidence available and the patient’s values and preferences. Shared decision making always includes the patient. Validated Pain Management goes a step further by also providing the clinician with in-depth knowledge of the individual’s situation—even about factors that person might not be aware of. This acknowledges the individual’s experience; it validates it.

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