Pain motivates patients to present to you for treatment and perform their rehab exercises. Why are your patients experiencing pain, and how can you accurately diagnose the source of their pain? Most importantly, how can you choose the best treatment, motivate your patients to perform their rehab, and help improve your patients pain?
Now available - Why does it hurt? Pain science for clinical practice with Simon Olivotto
With this three part presentation “Why does it hurt?” with Simon Olivotto, you’ll develop a strong understanding of the different pain mechanisms your patients are experiencing, sharpen your diagnostic accuracy, and deliver more effective, targeted treatments.
Part 1 – “Why does it hurt?”
In part 1, you’ll help your patient make sense of their pain, exploring nociception, central nervous system modulation and clinical examples of how the brain interprets and organises sensory information to form the experience of pain.
In part 1, you’ll discover:
- How to clearly and succinctly explain pain and recovery to your patients.
- Why are patients often sore, even without any tissue damage?
- How to recognise hyperalgesia, allodynia, temporal summation, as well as peripheral and central nervous system sensitivity changes, and how these impact your treatment.
- How will your treatment vary depending on whether your patient has actual tissue damage (eg a muscle tear), or they have pain without ANY tissue damage?
Part 2 “Why does it still hurt?”
In Part 2, you’ll explore factors that lead to persistent pain, and case studies demonstrating how you can successfully treat patients with persistent pain.
Why is your patient SO sensitive to pain? You’ll identify three specific neuroendocrine and neuroimmune mechanisms contributing to your patients pain sensitivity. You’ll know when your patients persistent pain has behavioural and psychological influences, and how to address these within the scope of our physiotherapy treatments.
Part 2 will help you explore:
- Why do patients develop persistent pain?
- Why does your patient still hurt, even when their tissue has recovered?
- How to identify and treat factors that influence your patients pain sensitivity.
- What is “endurance coping”, how it contributes to persistent pain in your patients, and how to treat it.
- How to know when your patients have adopted “safe” or “helpful” lifting, sitting and movement strategies such as an “upright spine”, “bracing your core” or “lifting with your spine” that are helpful, or actually making their pain worse.
- Why patients adopt and continue stretches, self-massage or other behaviours that make their pain worse.
- How to identify and address psychological influences on pain, such as mood, depression and anxiety.
Part 3 – “How to stop it hurting”
In Part 3 you’ll use your knowledge from “Why it hurts” and “Why it still hurts” to provide effective, efficient and targeted assessment and treatment.
In part 3, you’ll discover:
- Subjective and objective examination tips and strategies to recognise nociceptive, neuropathic and nociplastic pain presentations, that guide your treatment and help you decide when additional medical input is needed.
- How to identify & treat low back pain patients with a predominantly nociceptive pain presentation.
- When your patient has neck, shoulder and arm pain, or low back, hip and leg pain - how you can identify, differentiate and treat radicular pain and radiculopathy.
- Clinical examples taking you through how to treat neck pain patients with neuropathic and radicular pain conditions.
- How to identify and treat nociplastic presentations when your patient has severe, irritable, constant pain, with inconsistent aggravating and easing factors, and is a bit hard to pin down.
- 5 tips to easily incorporate cognitive functional therapy in your treatment and improve your results with persistent pain.
This three part presentation, available now, will take you through clinical examples and case studies that break down pain science into easy, clinically relevant tips, so you can confidently identify and treat acute and persistent pain in your patients.
Next week, Nick Kendrick will take you through how to identify, differentiate and treat common pain presentations, including somatic referred pain, neuropathic pain, facet joint, discogenic, SIJ and lumbar spine pain, tendon and bone pain.
Aims & Learning Outcomes
- Understand the underlying pain mechanisms in common musculoskeletal clinical presentations.
- Recognise clinical features of pain and understand the differences between primary and secondary hyperalgesia, allodynia, and temporal summation.
- Understand, recognise and manage factors that contribute to persistent pain.
- Sharpen subjective and objective assessment skills to recognise dominant pain classifications and providing targeted management strategies.
CLICK HERE to improve your clinical reasoning with a free trial Clinical Edge membership
