Occupational Therapy and Chronic Pain Management: HSD

1. The Biopsychosocial Nature of Chronic Pain for the Individual With Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder (HSD)

This chapter will introduce the biopsychosocial model and explain why it is important to address chronic pain intervention using this approach, specifically why it’s important to look at these factors when working with individuals with HSD. This is important because the biopsychosocial model describes a holistic, macro view of the client/patient versus focusing on impairment-based intervention or acute-based (remediation) that we typically see in the medical model, which is the traditional model of care where it’s expected that intervention will return the client/patient to their baseline, which is assumed to be “normal.”

2. Contributing Factors: Physical, Functional, and Emotional

This chapter will describe the multifactorial nature of chronic pain, explaining the importance of addressing factors that are affecting the client’s experience with pain, including physical, functional, and emotional changes or deficits. This is important to help learners understand that intervention is typically less successful, or unsuccessful, if approaching chronic pain from one perspective alone.

3. Intervention That Addresses the Needs of the Individual With Chronic Pain

This chapter will use the framework of the biopsychosocial approach and the concepts of the multifactorial nature of chronic pain to understand a comprehensive intervention for an individual with HSD. The intervention example will be posture/positioning and ergonomics to complete a chosen ADL and will use client demonstration to highlight a therapist walking the client through education on how to improve body awareness. This is important to demonstrate how the concepts from chapter 1 and 2 can be applied in a real-life setting.