Chronic pain doesn’t have to be a life sentence

Do you suffer from chronic pain? Is your pain debilitating and isolating? Does your pain stop you from enjoying life to the full? Do you fear you will never be free of your pain? Do you feel stuck in a never-ending loop of suffering, despite your best efforts?

Do you ever feel that you aren’t believed, that people don’t understand your chronic pain, and that with the best will in the world, they aren’t taking it as seriously as you’d like?

If you answered yes to two or more questions, it’s time we talked. And I don’t mean a shallow conversation, followed by a script for painkillers and generic advice on “learning to live with it”.

I mean a serious, sincere discussion, focused on you and your pain.

Why? Because pain is a personal experience – everyone experiences and interprets pain differently. Rote advice, rote treatment plans and rote painkiller prescriptions are no good – we’ve never met anyone who suffers from rote pain.

One of the primary challenges with long-term pain is that it is difficult to see beyond the pain itself. And often, the first step in dealing with chronic pain is to change the direction of how it is being treated.

At Mindful Health we take a biopsychosocial approach to pain management, meaning that we don’t just look and work with your physical pain. We work with you as a complete person, and so we also consider the psychological and social aspects of your chronic pain.  

This whole-person approach is at the centre of Mindful Health’s practice and is key to the results we achieve.

We know this approach works – and that it works very well. From 2018 to 2021 I ran a pain clinic in Auckland offering this biopsychosocial approach and multi-modal treatment, including mindfulness, for pain management. Based on patient-centred outcomes, the results were consistently the highest across all of the pain services subscribed to the Electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration, part of an ANZ Health Outcomes project. Our approach led to one of the Australian administrators commenting that many of our patients were exiting our service no longer meeting the definition of “patients with persistent pain.”

If you would like to know more about this approach to pain management and are interested in potentially no longer meeting the definition of a “patient with persistent pain”, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you and see how we might work together to ease your chronic pain.