Occupational Therapy and Chronic Pain Management: Overview

1. The Biopsychosocial Nature of Chronic Pain for the Individual With Chronic Pain

This chapter will introduce the biopsychosocial model and will explain why it is important to address chronic pain intervention using this approach. This is important because the biopsychosocial model describes a holistic, macro view of the client/patient versus focusing on impairment-based intervention, acute-based (remediation) that is typically seen in the medical model, or the traditional model of care where it’s expected that intervention will return the client/patient to their assumed normal baseline.

2. Contributing Factors: Physical, Functional, and Emotional

This chapter will describe the multifactorial nature of chronic pain by explaining the importance of addressing factors that affect 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. The intervention example is pacing and will use client demonstration to highlight a therapist walking a client through education on how to pace themselves physically and emotionally and how to apply pacing concepts to a chosen ADL at home for a home program. This is important to demonstrate how the concepts from chapter 1 and 2 can be applied in a real-life setting.