Pain Science Strategies – Moving Beyond Pain Toward a More Fulfilling Lifestyle

Course Description

What would it be like to be able to motivate people with persistent pain to engage in more meaningful activities for a higher quality of life beyond the limitations imposed by pain?

Help your patients break out of pain cycles that prevent them from embracing a higher quality of life.  Discover how chronic pain traps people in a downward spiral of fear avoidance behaviors, health provider shopping, endless pill popping, disability, isolation and depression.  Uncover how the traditional medical model of treating only physical symptoms without addressing underlying biopsychosocial issues fails to provide lasting change in cases of chronic pain.  Adopt transformational interventions into your current rehab plans to endorse positive coping mechanisms that build resilience for optimal pain management with less deleterious side effects.  Develop strategies to impact pain perception in a novel way using an educational approach that embraces neuroplasticity to encourage people to move beyond the hurt and fear.  Enhance your patients’ knowledge of how pain works. Gather multiple tips and tricks to mitigate pain intensity and disability, improve mood, anxiety and sleep, and promote performance.  Provide tools to boost participation in meaningful activities from ADL to work and recreation for measurable outcomes and more smiles in life!

Course Objectives

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

• Describe the neuroscience of pain perception in a manner patients can comprehend, challenging maladaptive perceptions using metaphors and stories to simplify the science of neuroplasticity.
• Discuss how pain is not always a harmful threat signal. Explain how the nervous system may respond to pain signals by becoming hypersensitive to threats, creating a pain cycle that entraps people into fear avoidance behaviors, catastrophizing, and disability.
• Explain how to motivate people to accept responsibility for becoming more engaged in their recovery by utilizing active strategies based on cognitive behavioral therapy, graded exercise, pacing, and mindful relaxation interventions to ease tension and pain.
• Explain how to alter the focus from pathology to function to maximize recovery and encourage people to return to doing more of the activities that create a meaningful quality of life, based on current evidence.

• Prerequisites

  None

• Educational Level

  Intermediate

• Other

  Satisfactory completion of this course will require the participant to respond to polling questions asked throughout the webinar.