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People's Campaign For Preventing Chronic Pain

Friday 11 September 2015

 

From Fibromyalgia News Today:

 

People's Campaign for Preventing Chronic Pain
 

People’s Campaign Launches Revolution in Health Care to Prevent Chronic Pain

By Charles Moore
September 8th, 2015

The International Myopain Society (IMS) and the National Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain Association have initiated the People’s Campaign for Preventing Chronic Pain to support helping every person who has or will have chronic pain learn to prevent the pain, disability, and other devastating effects. and, in the process, start a revolution in health care.

This campaign is designed to help transform the healthcare system by expanding research and education in developing and testing new on-line consumer training tools and innovative patient-centered coach-based treatment strategies. The Campaign encourages all health professionals to adopt a transformative care model — that is: integration of self-management training of patients with evidence-based treatments. Since the Campaign is about people taking charge of their health and healthcare, an Indiegogo crowdfunding platform to support preventing chronic pain will launch the campaign.

“This Campaign is about changing our whole approach to chronic pain,” explains Dr. James Fricton, a Course Director and Professor at the University of Minnesota, Senior Researcher at HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research, Pain Specialist at the Minnesota Head and Neck Pain Clinic, and currently President of the International Myopain Society, i a IS release. “By training people to make simple lifestyle changes that cause persistent pain, long-term treatment success improves dramatically. Self-management training is an essential component of care. Every health professional needs to integrate it into every treatment plan to achieve transformative care and not just palliative care.”

The International Myopain Society is a nonprofit, international, interdisciplinary health care organization based in the United States to support scientists, physicians, dentists, other health care professionals, and individuals interested in exchanging ideas, conducting research, or learning more about chronic pain from the many health conditions that cause it.

The National Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain Association unites patients, policy makers, and healthcare, medical and scientific communities to transform lives through visionary support, advocacy, research and education of fibromyalgia and chronic pain illnesses. The organization’s objective is to prevent chronic pain conditions from derailing lives by promoting early diagnosis, driving scientific research for a cure, and facilitating translational research for the THREE A’s of Treatment for fibromyalgia and chronic pain: Appropriate, Accessible, and Affordable.

The People’s Campaign for Preventing Chronic Pain addresses the “big elephant in the room” of health care: chronic pain — a category that includes back pain, headaches, neck pain, jaw pain and other tenacious typres of pain that are the number one reason for seeking health care, the number one cause of disability and addiction, and the number one driver of health care costs, with expenditures associated with diagnosing and treating chronic pain greater than the costs of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes according to the IMS, which also notes that addiction to pain killers leads to more deaths than motor vehicle accidents, and chronic pain costs in the United States alone exceed $500 billion in health care expenditures and lost work annually — equivalent to 25 percent of all health care costs and five percent of the gross domestic product. To say nothing of the personal impacts in terms of suffering, loss of function, disability, depression, and addiction, which are incalculable.

However, despite this toll, and while major efforts are underway to treat and prevent most other major health conditions, preventing chronic pain remains an enigma, overlooked by the public, neglected by the health care system, and generally ignored by the scientific community. Despite chronic pain’s massive societal and personal impact, the plight of chronic pain patients seeking health care is not encouraging. The IMF observes that if initial efforts for improving pain fail, as they frequently do, care often escalates to higher-cost higher-risk passive interventions such as ongoing opioid analgesics, polypharmacy, implantable devices, injections, physical therapies, and surgeries. However, dismally, most people with chronic pain after 30 days still have pain five years later despite extensive passive treatments.

Why is preventing chronic pain so difficult? The IMF says most research suggests that the presence risk factors that are under more under patients’ control such as repetitive strain, depression, poor sleep, stress, maladaptive postures, and ergonomic factors are the major causes of delayed recovery and failed treatment. Despite that fact that these risk factors can be improved with self-management strategies, they are not often addressed in routine pain care resulting in pain persisting for years.

Passive treatments such as medication, physical therapies, surgery and implants continue to be the dominant care strategy employed by health professionals since these sorts of therapy are better reimbursed, easier to implement, and less time-consuming than teaching patients self-management skills. Thus, chronic pain has become the major health care problem, and the IMF contends that if we really want to reform health care, we must focus on preventing chronic pain by engaging, empowering, and educating patients in reducing the risk factors and enhancing the protective factors to prevent chronic pain.

To improve the chronic pain problem, the IMF says the focus needs to be shifted to concentrate on prevention and early intervention of chronic pain, and that in order to do so, we need a broader conceptual model, shifting paradigms of care, new strategies for care delivery, and better ways to train patients. The IMF maintains that a human systems approach provides a broader understanding of the role of diverse lifestyle risk factors and protective factors in perpetuating chronic pain through recursive feedback cycles that increase peripheral and central sensitization.

The IMF contends that a broader conceptual basis is also required to improve chronic pain among the vast majority of patients, noting that many concepts are included in human systems approach including risk and protective factors in the seven realms, neuro-plasticity, positive psychology, cybernetics, chaos theory, and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Human Systems Theory (HST) stems from research in general system theory and originated in ecology out of the need to explain the inter-relatedness of organisms in ecosystems, and while conventional biological theories view the subject as a single entity, HST views a person as a whole with an inter-relationship between the sub parts of their life. These sub parts are not static” but rather are dynamic, evolving, and interrelated processes.

The IMF observes that a transformative care model for preventing chronic pain amounts to a rare “win-win-win” for patients, health care professionals, and business. A win for patients who achieve success in improving chronic pain, health, and wellness. A win for health professionals in improving outcomes of care by providing patients with more care options that integrate self-management training with bio-medical treatments, and a win for businesses. deriving from lower health care costs and increased productivity through decreasing work loss and disability due to chronic pain.

This triple win is the goal of the People’s Campaign for Preventing Chronic pain. The Campaign is about the people: Helping each and every person who has or will have chronic pain prevent it.

The global People’s Campaign for Preventing Chronic Pain has three goals:

1. Expand education of both patients and health professionals on how to prevent chronic pain using a transformative care model and employ it with each patient with on-line Training Tool-kits to educate consumers, patients, employees, and health professionals and transform healthcare so that every person learns how to prevent chronic pain, and through creative, interactive and engaging web-based training programs for patients and how to do it. Certification workshops for health professionals are being developed as part of this campaign to implement transformative care model in every community.

2. Expand research research and development on preventing chronic pain with development of the Chronic Pain Research Network as well as strategies and tools such as Research Toolkits that health professionals can use to identify causes of chronic pain and ways improve their prevention and early management of chronic pain conditions, and to connect health professionals with patients and researchers to better understand causes and treatments for chronic pain.

3. Expand advocacy to increase awareness of the importance of preventing chronic pain by health plans, businesses, government agencies, and communities with Media Toolkits to spread the word about the importance of preventing chronic pain and how we can transform health care for all, and by asking people and businesses to take the Chronic Pain Challenge and tell their story of how they prevented chronic pain and how both individuals and groups can work together to solve the big elephant in the room of health care.

The People’s Campaign for Preventing Chronic Pain provides engaging personalized on-line training toolkits for individuals, health professionals, and employers as a Perk for contributing, and available to help everyone learn how to prevent chronic pain. The organizers say initial results show 93 percent of participants in the on-line training believed it changed their life.

Charles Moore
Charles is a force to be reckoned with in the world of print and new media. From an interview with him in LowEndMac: ”His articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40 magazines, newspapers and websites in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. . . a columnist for The Halifax Daily News and the Saint John Telegraph Journal, Atlantic Fisherman, and news editor and columnist for Applelinks.com, a columnist and contributing editor for MacOpinion and PBCentral, as well as writing for Low End Mac.” Charles serves as the Senior Section Editor for the Science and Research section of BioNews Texas and contributes science-related articles on a daily basis.

© BioNews Services 2015. All rights reserved.

The above originally appeared here.

 


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