Chronic Pain Management

The prevalence of the chronic disease has escalated, in particular the rise in the diagnosis of chronic pain. Therefore the role of the patient in self-management is imperative. Hence, we need to design cost-effective, replicable self-management programs that improve function and reduce the need for healthcare utilisation. All the treatments utilised in this practice emphasise the importance of active participation by the patient, the importance of experiential learning and the role of social reinforcement and reintegration in the learning process.  We will encourage our patients to use the knowledge from the educational component and implement behavioural changes to experience the benefit thereof.

As we progress through life, there are different variables that interact and result in our experience, and these experiences ultimately affect Riana van Wyk Biokinetics approach to pain. Pain and emotional behaviours occur automatically and do not require conscious deliberation, planning or intention. These behaviours are not a defining dimension of pain, but they do provide us with some insight into the behaviour of someone living with pain.

By addressing the way a patient thinks about pain and their behavioural responses, we can shift thinking patterns and reduce the pain experience adequately for biokineticist’s to address pain by working on flexibility, strength, cardiovascular fitness and hydrotherapy. The patient needs to be approached within a biopsychosocial context that is interdisciplinary and should be patient-centred.A biopsychosocial approach is an approach which helps therapists examine your biological, psychological and social factors which may be affecting you and also helps examine how and why disorders occur.

Pain is a very complex perception of events experienced as a threat to your body, and it has a sensory (location, intensity, duration or pain) and affective component (emotional and cognitive). In order to address pain, chronic pain, in particular, the biokineticists must assess the patient as a whole and look at the medical, social, psychological and contextual factors that interplay to create pain. So often, people develop negative coping mechanisms in order to survive. What survival means depends on the person.

The initial assessment is an opportunity to create a foundation for successful rehabilitation. Using a patient-centred approach, Riana van Wyk focuses on what the patient wants to achieve to build a good patient-clinician therapeutic rapport. You will be emailed forms and questionnaires to complete before your arrival and these guide my information gathering and clinical decision-making processes. During an assessment, we address all these components in order to create the best person you can be, and we design an individual management program that is tailored to your needs.  During the first contact session, Riana van Wyk will establish a baseline of activity that you, as the patient, can complete without causing an increase in symptoms based on activities you prefer. Riana van Wyk will teach you to pace yourself and your daily activity into manageable portions that don’t exacerbate symptoms and slowly start building it up.

Once we have this program, you will be guided towards creating patient-centred goals, based on what you would like to do, to keep you motivated. Some of the components of a treatment plan will consist of:

  • Pain neuroscience education (PNE) is an educational intervention tool to teach patients to understand their pain experience from a biological and physiological perspective, thus enabling them to make informed decisions about their symptoms thereby limiting its effects.
  • The benefits of exercise in chronic pain patients is:
  • Improves memory function,
  • Prevents injury-associated loss of threat messengers.
  • Reverses age-related vulnerability to injury,
  • Reduced interaction with the immune modulated threat messengers.
  • Reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease,
  • primary prevention of type 2 diabetes and improved glucose homeostasis,
  • reductions in the incidence of specific cancers,
  • Prevents loss of bone mineral density and osteoporosis in postmenopausal women,
  • Improves functional independence, mobility, psychological wellbeing and overall quality of life.
  • Mindfulness techniques such as abdominal breathing and progressive muscle relaxation and many more tools that you could use to manage your pain.
  • Keep an eye on the blog posts for more information.