Lip Service: Using Words as the Foundation for Pain Management

Chronic pain, as one of the most common reasons adults seek medical care, requires foundational steps to set up treatment success. Patient education on diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis can have huge impacts on the outcomes of an individual seeking treatment.

Communication is often believed to be an important component of multidisciplinary care and patient experiences. This session will show how to effectively communicate with patients in chronic pain in order to maximize outcomes. We will discuss potential avenues to provide education and information in a way that focuses on appropriate management of a patient’s diagnosis and resolution of fears they may bring from previous medical advice or personal experience.

Understanding the benefits of placebo and nocebo effects, and taking these findings into consideration when providing procedural or intervention counseling and appropriate referral of patients, may have powerful impacts to current practice. Also to be discussed in this course will be patient expectation management—a challenging subject related to prognosis and developing tools on how to have those challenging conversations in a way that continues to promote activity engagement and reduce fear avoidance.