What to do when one size does not fit all

Alert: rant ahead.

Early in my career working in persistent pain management, it was thought that “chronic pain is chronic pain is chronic pain” and pretty much anything that helped one person would help the next. Over time we’ve learned a lot more about persistent pain: the mechanisms differ a lot between neuropathic mechanisms and nociplastic mechanisms. Even within these groups, the mechanisms are very different. We’ve also learned a lot more about the psychosocial variables that are associated with prolonged disability and distress when pain persists. Some of the earliest work by Turk and colleagues found that by using the Westhaven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory, people could be classified into four subgroups (Kerns, Turk & Rudy, 1985). While the names of these subgroups could do with some updating (to avoid negative labelling), there’s a large body of research supporting the four groups they found.

When I first worked at Burwood Pain Management Centre, the WHYMPI was the workhorse pre-assessment questionnaire used to help clinicians understand more about the person they were seeing. Interestingly, at the time there were two group programmes on offer: one was the three week full time residential pain management programme, and people who were admitted to this programme were those with high levels of distress and disability, often with very unhelpful beliefs about their pain, and needing the intensity of the full-time programming to help them make changes that would be sustained when they went home. The other was an outpatient programme, two sessions a week for six weeks, and this was intended for people who had more disturbance in their relationships with others, who felt unsupported and as a result were distressed. Also in this group were people who were generally managing well but needed to learn some new skills so they could get on with their lives.

Times change. Neither of those programmes are running in the same way as they were and there’s been an increase in individual sessions with single discipline input right around the world. Some commentators point out that changing funding models has led to the rise of single discipline intervention (Loeser, 2006), others discuss the ethical dilemmas raised by funding that is allocated on outputs (numbers of people seen) rather than outcomes (how well those people who have been seen are doing, and especially how well they do over time) (Loeser & Cahanda, 2013). This discourse has spilled over into how clinical guidelines have been developed (Chou, Atlas, Loeser, Rosenquist & Stanos, 2011), and this in turn has led to policy and funding decisions made at local level.

The rise of interventional pain treatment (Manchikanti, Pampati, Sigh & Falco, 2013) has been observed right around the world, including in New Zealand. Interventional pain treatments aim to reduce pain intensity via non-surgical means, often through anaesthetic injections (blocks), and in some cases by localising the supposed source of nociception through diagnostic blocks, then ablating or coagulating the proteins around the nerve, to stop transmission (Cohen, Stojanovic, Crooks, Kim, Schmidt, Shields et al, 2008). These latter procedures apply to a very small proportion of people with back pain, nevertheless they are popular – albeit not always applied to the cohort of people originally intended (Bogduk & McGuirk, 2002).

Alongside the rise of interventional procedures, in New Zealand there has been a shift from passive physiotherapy modalities (acupuncture, heat packs, interferential, ultrasound) to active management – which pretty much looks like exercise in New Zealand. New Zealand’s ACC funds community-based pain management programmes that are intended to be tailored to the person’s needs, have a multidisciplinary team approach, and use a multifactorial model of pain. While these programmes superficially look progressive and innovative, results from a recent study colleagues and I have carried out, sadly it looks much like exercise plus psychology, and the teamwork aspect is minimal. More concerning is the rise of “cookie cutter” programmes, limited understanding and use of the carefully collected psychometric information completed by patients, and inappropriate referrals to the services.

The landscape of publicly funded pain management in New Zealand is fraught with problems. Each district has a health board consisting of elected plus appointed members. District health boards have the task of allocating the money central government gives them, according to the needs and wishes of the community. Note that in NZ, accident-related rehabilitation is funded by our national accident insurer (we only have one, it’s no-fault and 24/7). Given we have patchy community service provision for people with pain following accidental injury, you’d think our district health boards would have some consistent approach to helping the one in five Kiwi’s living with pain lasting more than three months. Now while not everyone who has persistent pain will need help to manage it (think of those with osteoarthritic knees and hips who are not quite ready to head to surgery), amongst those who have the most trouble with pain are also those with a history of trauma. Christchurch and the Canterbury area have had, over the past 10 years, over 10,000 earthquakes (the last noticeable one was only last week – take a look at geonet), the Kaikoura earthquakes, and the mosque shooting. During the five or so years after the earthquakes, the city’s children were disrupted by changes to schools (thanks, Hekia Parata and the National Party – you are not forgiven). What all these events have in common is the impact on people with pain. And you guessed it, there is no coherent national approach to pain management, no pain plan or policy.

We know there is a relationship between traumatic events, particularly those in early childhood, and persistent pain (eg Ne4lson, Simons & Logan, 2018). We also know that victims of crush injuries, traumatic amputations, and bullet wounds are likely to experience greater neuropathic pain which is particularly hard to treat. People with persistent pain, especially when it’s been around for some years, are also likely to have poor sleep, mood problems, anxiety problems, and in many cases, will have had repeated surgeries and be given a multitude of pharmaceuticals to help reduce pain and distress.

The problem is that when these are applied without the support of a team, they may well be applied without finesse. They may reduce pain, a little (though this is arguable given how poorly analgesics perform – and the misapplication of the WHO analgesic ladder, Ballantyne, Kalso & Stannard, 2016). But we know that pain intensity and disability are not well-correlated. So while the focus on reducing pain via injections, ablations, surgery, pharmaceuticals and so on is helpful on it’s own it doesn’t necessarily change a person’s sleep pattern, their low mood, their lost job, their fear of moving, the relationship that’s fallen apart, the loss of sense of self…

Worse: when pain management is poorly coordinated and doesn’t target the real needs of people who live with pain and who don’t respond to these efforts (the majority of people with neuropathic pain, for example), people don’t stop seeking help. They pop up in all sorts of places: primary care practices (to the GP who is over-worked, poorly supported and often poorly educated about pain); via Emergency Department (where, although the pain may have been present for a long time, it must be treated as an acute pain problem because that’s what EDs do); admitted for investigations, to provide “respite” for family, to be reviewed yet again by a clinician who is not well-informed about pain because our training in pain is pretty poor (Shipton, Bate, Garrick, Steketee, Shipton and Visser, 2018). They are invisible to NZs health system because they’re not coded as having pain as their primary problem. And people with persistent pain don’t die, and the public’s attention (and media) is focused on deaths. Like the long-lasting Covid-19 patients who continue to have trouble from Covid-19 months after their initial infection, people with persistent pain just hang around. And medical-only approaches simply do not work to treat rehabilitation needs. Rehabilitation is where it’s at. But rehabilitation is no longer a focus of in-patient care in hospitals (neither should it be) – but there are few places outside of hospitals that are funded and staffed to help.

This lengthy post is written out of frustration because too often I’ve seen conversations about pain management saying “oh it doesn’t work” – true! Nothing works well. But most things work a bit. Our problem is twofold: we can’t predict who will and won’t respond very well (though the old WHYMPI and similar psychometric measures/profiles do offer some guidance); and we have little national cohesion around sharing resources. We need to better monitor the impact of our treatments so we can quickly add, or remove, treatments to target particular problems. And all of the providers must have skills for working with people who have persistent pain.

Let’s do better. Let’s clamour for more nationwide planning. Let’s raise the profile of the allied health workforce who do the majority of rehabilitation with people living with pain. Let’s make our teams TEAMS not sets of individuals working in parallels. Let’s have some leadership around the value of pain management, and why it’s important. Let’s bring this whole issue to light. Let’s do it.

Ballantyne, J. C., Kalso, E., & Stannard, C. (2016). WHO analgesic ladder: a good concept gone astray. BMJ, 352, i20. doi:10.1136/bmj.i20

Bogduk, N & McGuirk, B. (2002). Medical Management of Acute and Chro5nic Low Back Pain. An Evidence-based Approach. Pain Research and Clinical Management, Vol3. Elsevier.

Chou, R., Atlas, S. J., Loeser, J. D., Rosenquist, R. W., & Stanos, S. P. (2011). Guideline warfare over interventional therapies for low back pain: can we raise the level of discourse? J Pain, 12(8), 833-839. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2011.04.012

Cohen, S. P., Stojanovic, M. P., Crooks, M., Kim, P., Schmidt, R. K., Shields, C. H., . . . Hurley, R. W. (2008). Lumbar zygapophysial (facet) joint radiofrequency denervation success as a function of pain relief during diagnostic medial branch blocks: a multicenter analysis. Spine Journal: Official Journal of the North American Spine Society, 8(3), 498-504.

Kerns, R. D., Turk, D. C., & Rudy, T. E. (1985). The west haven-yale multidimensional pain inventory (WHYMPI). Pain, 23(4), 345-356.

Loeser, J. D. (2006). Comprehensive Pain Programs Versus Other Treatments for Chronic Pain. The Journal of Pain 7(11), 800-801.

Loeser, J. D., & Cahana, A. (2013). Pain medicine versus pain management: ethical dilemmas created by contemporary medicine and business. Clin J Pain, 29(4), 311-316. doi:10.1097/AJP.0b013e3182516e64

Manchikanti, L., Pampati, V., Singh, V., & Falco, F. J. (2013). Assessment of the escalating growth of facet joint interventions in the medicare population in the United States from 2000 to 2011. Pain Physician, 16(4), E365-378.

Nelson, S., Simons, L. E., & Logan, D. (2018). The incidence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and their association with pain-related and psychosocial impairment in youth with chronic pain. The Clinical Journal of Pain, 34(5), 402-408.

Shipton, E. E., Bate, F., Garrick, R., Steketee, C., Shipton, E. A., & Visser, E. J. (2018). Systematic review of pain medicine content, teaching, and assessment in medical school curricula internationally. Pain and therapy, 1-23.