This course is for you who wish to adopt a contemporary understanding of pain into your clinical practice. The content is focused on “how to understand pain” to help us understand “why someone is experiencing pain”. By understanding the mechanisms behind your patient’s pain you can create a strategy together with your patient targeting these unique mechanisms.

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw

Our understanding of pain has changed over the last century and especially the last 10-15 years has revolutionized the way we think about pain today [1]. The purpose of this course is to is to take you from a biomedical and simple understanding of pain to a contemporary understanding of pain which embraces the complexity and views pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon produced by the brain or the person.

Most health care professionals have a biomedical background [2] and this course will, therefore, have an emphasis on the psychosocial factors and how to understand and address these.

Using a biomedical approach in the treatment of pain has been linked to increased sick leave [3] and can potentially cause the patient unnecessary harm [4]. As a health care provider, you have the greatest influencing factor on your patient’s beliefs and understanding of pain [5] which means that you as a health care provider play a critical part in the beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes a patient carries towards their pain and their chances of recovery. Patients behavior are guided by their understanding of their pain problem this is why it is so important to be able to embrace the psychosocial factors of pain and address them appropriately.

A big problem when dealing with chronic pain is the existence of many unhelpful beliefs about pain or illness perceptions which cultivate fear, avoidance behavior and increased protection by the nervous system and the brain. Pain biology education is one way to teach patients about the complexity of pain and help change these unhelpful beliefs and illness perceptions which have been shown to be an effective treatment for pain [6].

During this course, you will learn how to change your patients’ beliefs about pain and encourage new behaviors and attitudes. You will learn how to listen for potential threats to recovery and how to communicate in a way that promotes therapeutic alliance and reassurance. How you can communicate and convey information can also cause both a positive effect (placebo) or a negative effect (nocebo). These phenomena will be explained so you can optimize your treatment effect. After the course, you will have the tools to piece together a treatment which gives the patient resources to master their situation and to recover and grow.

[1] Moseley GL, Butler DS. 2015. Fifteen Years of Explaining Pain: The Past, Present, and Future. Pain

[2] Nijs J, Roussel N, Paul van Wilgen C, Köke A, Smeets R. 2013. Thinking beyond muscles and joints: therapists’ and patients’ attitudes and beliefs regarding chronic musculoskeletal pain are key to applying effective treatment. Man Ther.

[3] Reme SE, Hagen EM, Eriksen HR. 2009. Expectations, perceptions, and physiotherapy predict prolonged sick leave in subacute low back pain. BMC Musculoskelet Disord.

[4] Lin IB, O’Sullivan PB, Coffin JA, Mak DB, Toussaint S, Straker LM. 2013. Disabling chronic low back pain as an iatrogenic disorder: a qualitative study in Aboriginal Australians. BMJ Open.

[5] Darlow B, Dowell A, Baxter GD, Mathieson F, Perry M, Dean S. 2013. The enduring impact of what clinicians say to people with low back pain. Ann Fam Med.

[6] Louw A, Zimney K, Puentedura EJ, Diener I. 2016. The efficacy of pain neuroscience education on musculoskeletal pain: A systematic review of the literature. Physiother Theory Pract.