Chronic Pain & Pain Neuroscience Education for the PT, OT, & AT: The Evaluation

Course Description

Do you treat patients with chronic pain from injuries ranging anywhere from ACL tears to fibromyalgia? No matter your profession (PT, OT, AT) or your practice setting, you likely spend a majority of your mental energy each day on patients with pain lasting longer than 3 months.

This course is designed to give step by step instructions on ways to better evaluate patients with chronic pain that can be transferred to the busy clinic schedule the next day. Pain Neuroscience Education (PNE) refers to educational sessions designed to help patients better understand the physiology of pain at the nervous system level. This course will review PNE evaluation techniques to help ensure that we are both accurately tracking patient progress and helping to answer a common patient question – Why am I still in pain? Patient handouts will be provided as well to help decrease patient fear about their MRI or X ray results that often can be a barrier to functional progression.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, the participant will be able to:

• Explain the role Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists & Athletic Trainers play in fighting the opioid crisis for athletes, weekend warriors, and patients with chronic pain
• Compare & contrast biomedical vs biopsychosocial models
• Explain the difference between “low tech” and “high tech” evaluations for patients
• Evaluate modifications to subjective & objectives portions of evaluation for patients who are overly pain focused
• Implement patient reported & objective functional measurements during evaluations for patients who are overly pain focused
• Define Pain Neuroscience Education & be able to use simple metaphors to help decrease fear of pain for patients during the initial evaluation
• Summarize the research on the effectiveness of pain neuroscience education

• Prerequisites

  None

• Educational Level

  Intermediate

• Other

  Satisfactory completion of this course will require the participant to complete a 10 question post-test with a minimum passing score of 70%.

  Level of Difficulty for ATs:  Advanced Level