Joe's Story Joe was getting used to working as a physiotherapist in an interprofessional pain management clinic. He wrote quickly as he summarized the assessment of his last patient. Although the...

Joe's Story

Joe was getting used to working as a physiotherapist in an interprofessional pain management clinic. He wrote quickly as he summarized the assessment of his last patient. Although the assessment had taken 1 hour and the patient had lots of problems, he knew that he would only get about 1 minute to report on this patient at the case conference with the other healthcare professionals who had also seen the patient that day. He was mastering the art of confining his report to the key findings that the rest of the team would find useful. He realized that there would be some overlap with the doctor's report, and he would need to avoid repetition. On reflection, he realized that the rest of the team questioned him now far less than they did when he first started work there. They were clearly learning to trust his judgement.

                One of his key findings was that the patient strongly believed that her ongoing pain meant that there was continuing injury. This was why the patient was so reluctant to move. If their management was to be successful, it would need to include a strong educational element in the treatment plan. They would need to persuade the patient to think about the pain differently. He realized just how much his own thinking had changed through working in the clinic. Most of the therapy they offered was designed to get patients to move away from thinking of their bodies as broken machines and instead to work on ways of managing their chronic pain. The underlying message of the therapy was that ‘life is a journey’, and they could provide patients with the means of moving on with that life, despite chronic pain.