The power of pain education

The project was developed in response to a recent report by We Are Undefeatable: ‘Bridging the Gap’ found that pain was the number one reason preventing those with long term conditions from getting active.

The report also found that many of the professionals working alongside these people didn’t know pain was the number one factor, instead citing a lack of motivation and cost as the main reasons.

If a client or patient is finding it challenging to get moving, ask them: is pain a problem? It’s worth encouraging them to get it checked out by a health professional if so, especially if they’re uncertain whether it’s acute or persistent pain.

Persistent pain is any pain that lasts longer than three months, a long time after normal healing should have occurred (though many can develop persistent pain even without an initial injury). For these people, movement is an important tool for recovery, and it is almost always safe to move.

Help people feel heard, believed and reassured that recovery IS possible. People recover faster when they get back to the activities they love, so it might be helpful to make goals based on the things that matter to them (not just reducing pain levels).

Resources

• Watch Ten Top Tips from Dr Tim Williams: these short videos from Live Well With Pain explain a positive outcome from a healthcare consultation, but the tips on listening to their whole story and asking about life can apply to any kind of conversation.
• Watch Mind your Flippin’ Language: this Flippin’ Pain webinar explores how our words influence the outcome.
• Read the Accusation Audit: a guide about creating trust with a patient/client.

Learning more about the science of pain has been shown to help the recovery process. We encourage everyone (you included!) to get to know the basics of pain science.

Over the past 30 years, researchers have learnt a lot of new information about how our pain system works. The trouble is: this new science hasn’t trickled down to the people working with – or experiencing – pain.

We’re raised to believe that pain only happens when we’re injured, but the new science actually tells us that pain is about protection from danger, not detection of danger. We get pain when our brain wants us to stop doing something it thinks (rightly or wrongly) will cause more harm to the body.

In a nutshell, when pain is ‘persistent’ (or ‘chronic’: they both mean the same thing), it’s because this protection system has gone into overdrive, becoming oversensitive and overprotective.

So why does this all matter? It means that there are lots of ways to reduce the sensitivity of this protection system, if we approach it the right way. Understanding this science has been life-changing for people living with pain across the world.

You don’t need to be a pain scientist to explain this stuff: there are lots of resources to help you.

Resources

• Watch a 5 minute summary of how pain works, if you’re tied for time!
• Listen to the Flippin’ Pain formula, a podcast made up of seven short episodes, available on the Flippin’ Pain website and wherever you get your podcasts.
• Read the Recovery Strategies workbook, or if you have extra time, read ‘Explain Pain’ by David Butler and Lorimer Moseley.
• Lots more resources are available on our ‘Resources’ page.

The new science of pain tells us that one of the proven, best ways to reduce this oversensitivity is (you guessed it!) moving more.

We recommend people go to see a health professional if they have any concerns, but it’s almost always safe for people with persistent pain to move. It might produce a bit more pain, especially at the beginning until they get used to it: but as the science shows, an increase in pain does not mean an increase in injury.

We all know a supportive coach can make all the difference. Empower people to gradually move more, with an emphasis on ‘gradual’. A good rule of thumb is the ‘two-point guide’: give the pain a rating before they start on a scale of 0-10. Then try to start with movements that don’t cause pain to increase by more than 2 points on that scale. We call this the ‘sweet zone’.

Resources

• Our ‘sweet zone’ guide takes you through this process step by step. It also signposts to lots of different websites for further support.
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