Those who are younger, perceiving adequate self-management support from healthcare providers, have higher education, better overall health, and receiving sufficient pain management tend to engage and profit better in self-management of their pain condition. These are the findings in a new study, and it may be what you expected, but this information has a flip side.
Focusing on the flip side of what you see
Chronic Pain Self-Management Programs aims to help people with chronic pain to better manage their symptoms and their daily lives. These include both physical- and psychological elements like learning coping techniques for problems like fatigue, frustration, poor sleep, and isolation. It also includes increased physical activity at an individual level, healthy living, and increased understanding of pain, its impact, and treatment.
Multiple studies have documented how persons living with pain who take part in the management of their pain, and who engage in self-management of their pain as part of the treatment, experience significant better outcomes in terms of pain intensity, function, mood, and sleep. Over all they have a better quality of life. It is also documented that self-pain-management leads to fewer contact with healthcare and to better compliance with other treatments. Self-management is therefor increasingly recommended for managing pain, and healthcare professionals are encouraged to promote self-management.
Interestingly in this new study, variables like pain intensity, disability, and mental health state were not significant predictors of engagement in and benefit from self-management.
Some of the predictors for self-management found in the new study are modifiable some are not. Younger age and higher education were associated with better self-management, factors not easily changed. But indeed better pain management, adequate self-management support from healthcare providers, and help toward a better overall health are modifiable factors.
This evidence for benefits on promoting and support self-pain-management by healthcare and healthcare professionals, should lead to including self-management of pain as a natural part all pain management and designs of pain management programs. Not just by mentioning it, but by promote, assist, and support self-pain-management, and by ongoing evaluation of both effect and engagement. It should also lead everyone living with pain to ask for this support and assistance from healthcare professionals, and to seek those who want to help. Importantly the self-management must be at an individual level, like all other treatments of chronic pain conditions, there is no “one-size-fits-all”. Best results in terms of outcome must, based on the findings in this study, can be expected for younger persons with higher education and better overall health. If you want best results, this is where to focus. However, the study does not document that self-pain-management isn’t effective for everyone else. Many studies have documented the value of self-management as a cornerstone in pain management, not necessarily sufficient alone, but as an important support for all other treatments for everyone. So the flip side of the findings in this study points at where both persons living with pain and indeed their healthcare professionals must address increased attention and effort to pass barriers and to establish self-pain-management. This is for those not of younger age, with lower education, and poorer overall health, by far the largest group of persons living with pain indicating the huge potential here.
