Psychotherapy Services for Pain

Psychotherapy Services for Pain

Summary

Psychotherapy can provide a safe, non-drug method to treat your pain directly by reducing high levels of physiological stress that often aggravate pain.

Psychological treatment also helps improve the indirect consequences of pain by helping you learn how to cope with the problems associated with pain.

Much of psychological treatment for pain is education, helping sufferers gain skills to manage a very difficult problem. The most common psychological treatments are:

Talk therapy: Talk therapy offers the support and counseling of a psychiatrist or psychologist.

Relaxation training: Patients learn how to enter a physiological state of deep relaxation that has been associated with healing and pain reduction.

Stress management: Stress can make pain worse. Stress management treatment helps patients understand the relationship between stress and pain and teaches them ways to reduce stress and ease pain.

Pain coping skills training: By learning how to accommodate your life to pain, you can improve your quality of life significantly.

Research

According to psychcentral.com, new research finds that psychotherapy can often do more than just help an individual cope with pain, as patient’s report a reduction of pain after psychotherapy. Intervention to help individuals learn to live a life with pain has often included physical therapy along with psychological counseling.

The review reports on 12 pain-related outcomes, including pain intensity, pain interference, depression, health care use, disability and health-related quality of life.

When the researchers analyzed specific outcomes, they found that the largest and most consistent effect was a reduction in pain intensity.

This was somewhat surprising, because when psychologists first began developing interventions for chronic pain several decades ago, the goal was not to reduce pain but to help patients live with their pain more successfully.

A growing body of knowledge suggests that these interventions are actually having a primary effect on people’s experience of pain.

“Surgery, opioids, nerve blocks, spinal cord stimulators, implantable drug delivery systems — every one of those particular alternatives is much more expensive and has poorer or at best equal outcomes compared to rehabilitation programs that include psychological components,” said Turk. “The paradox is that, despite data on the effectiveness of psychological interventions, insurers are less willing to pay for them.”

Indeed, Marketdata's research corroborates this. Marketdata's 2003 study on pain management programs found that less pain treatment programs were using psychotherapy. It is no surprise that programs are using less psychotherapy, as reimbursement for this has declined in recent years. The decline has been dramatic. In 1997, we found that 91.7% of pain management programs were using psychotherapy. This share fell to 78% in 1999, 74% in 2001, and 55.5% by 2002.

* page last updated 04/10/2008