Diagnosis & Treatment for The Complicated Pain Patient: Central Sensitization, CRPS, & Debilitating Pain

Course Description

“My pain is a 12/10 and just thinking about moving my hand/foot makes my pain go through the roof. I’ve tried therapy and pain medicine before and nothing helps. I’m just here because my doctor told me that I need to come.”

So, what do you do?

Whether your patient has diffuse, debilitating chronic pain, central sensitization, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) or some other form of debilitating pain, you as a PT, OT, or AT know that your treatment approach needs to be different. This course will go over current best practice recommendations around objective diagnosis tests for complicated pain conditions such as those with CRPS including testing for laterality, allodynia, and hyperalgesia. Graded motor imagery treatment principles such as laterality training, motor imagery, and mirror therapy will be presented for complicated pain patients with case studies highlighting clinical reasoning skills that can be applied to the clinic the next day.  This course can be taken as a stand alone course or as a companion to the Pain Neuroscience Education (PNE) – Evaluation, PNE – Treatment, or Manual Therapy from a Pain Neuroscience education approach courses currently available through Allied Health Education.

Course Objectives

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

1. Define complex regional pain syndrome and central sensitization and recognize common patient presentations of both pain disorders
2. Describe the common sensorimotor deficits seen in chronic pain including impaired laterality recognition, allodynia, primary/secondary hyperalgesia, and impaired 2- point discrimination
3. Plan a therapeutic treatment intervention around the principles of graded motor imagery (laterality training, motor imagery, and mirror therapy)
4. Recall the evidence supporting the use of graded motor imagery in treatment of pain disorders such as central sensitization and CRPS
5. Apply pain diagnosis and graded motor imagery principles to a patient case report with complex regional pain syndrome describing correct diagnostic tools and suggested order of interventions

• 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