Welcome

This approach starts with learning about how pain works and how your body and brain can change with practice. It also involves picking up practical skills to help retrain your pain over time - things you can do to feel better and slowly move towards recovery. Finally, connecting with people, activities and places you value, with knowledgeable health professionals and community. Learning, doing and connecting are the three elements of modern pain treatment.

Along with patience, persistence and determination, the evidence clearly shows that many people can improve and even recover from chronic pain.

Chronic pain is often very challenging.  If you’re supporting someone with chronic pain, understanding the challenges they face, recognising what is likely to help, what is not, and how to offer support that builds confidence and progress over time, can be a game changer. With just a bit of understanding, you can enable and empower them towards resilience and recovery.

Over the past 30 years, scientific advances have reshaped our understanding of chronic pain and how best to treat it. No single treatment works for everyone, but the one consistent finding from dozens of studies is that gaining a modern understanding of how pain works is the critical first step towards real change. This understanding seems to power up the practical strategies that can gradually retrain the pain system and give people the knowledge and confidence to gradually re-engage with the activities, people and places they value. Change often takes time and effort, but strong evidence shows that improvement is likely and recovery is possible.

Recovery means different things to different people. Some see it as 'I am 100% better'; others see it as 'having a full and meaningful life'; others see it as an ongoing state of improvement, not a final endpoint.

The inherent drive of the brain and body to change means that change is inevitable, but how we change is not. Understanding the kinds of things that can help people move towards recovery, and coaching people in how to harness this drive to change, is the cornerstone of modern pain care. What is more, adopting this approach to your own care delivery has benefits for you too!

Over 100 clinical trials, with a wide range of chronic pain conditions, support an approach that is grounded in good quality education. In fact, for the most common chronic pain – back pain – a network meta-analysis of clinical trials concluded that pain education programs and active care provide the most sustainable benefits of all treatments.

This massive evidence base shows that the cornerstone of chronic pain care is learning. Learning about how pain and recovery work and how your brain and body interact to keep you safe, but also how they can change over time and with training.

Another 90 or so clinical trials support teaching people new skills - things they can actually do to manage their pain and improve their quality of life. As they practice these skills, they get better at them. Critically –the likelihood that people will be open to this approach to their pain problem is higher if people first understand why they really can help.

Finally, preventing and overcoming chronic pain is facilitated by connecting people to current thinking health professionals and community supports, as well as the things, places and people they value.

Every health professional can implement a Learn.Do.Connect approach, using their own skills and expertise. That’s why Rethink Pain is not about specific treatments or professional disciplines - we are, after all, all in this together.