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Sep 02 2018
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Managing Pain – A Reality Check

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, Consumer, ePatient, Informaticist, Researcher

Last month I asked for a reality check from my social networks on behalf of the Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support (PCCDS) Learning Network about helping people use information better in managing pain:

Everyone makes decisions about managing pain sometime in their lives. Most people with chronic illness make repeated decisions about managing pain every day. Some people are fortunate to have strong relationships with trusted clinicians and care partners to share the decisions about managing pain. An alarming number of people have found themselves in a downward spiral of addiction to opioids first taken to manage their acute or chronic pain.

Many (more than 25) of you responded. You being People at the Center of Care (people with pain, medical and non-medical professionals advising and treating people with pain, and the people who support patients and professionals day-to-day.) Thank you for your insights. They make a difference. Here’s a summary, lightly edited, of what I heard.

Opioids and Pain

Most respondents couldn’t relate to opioid clinical decision support.  They could relate to pain management. Nobody said they preferred to take opioids. A few said that when their chronic pain was really bad, opioids were the only thing that worked. They were frustrated that they couldn’t get them anymore due to the heavy focus on opioid reduction.

  • When I have a sickle cell crisis, only opioids relieve my pain. I’ve had to remain in excruciating pain because they thought I was drug seeking.

Describing Pain

Describing pain is frustrating and limiting

  • The question frustrated me every time. I asked them to create a standard list to choose from addressing the quality, duration, intensity, location, etc. of the pain. That would have been so helpful. As you have learned to gain awareness to name and to know your pain, your mindful ability to stay with it, rather than run from it, I believe is part of the equation you seek to address. Aversion and fear of our experiences only add another layer of pain.
  • I have to manage my doctors’ abilities to hear about the pain. If I score too high I’m a complainer and they think nothing will work. If too low, then I’m not worth treating.

Pain Goals and Concerns

Managing pain occurs in the context of a life (determinants of health)

  • Discuss my pain goals and concerns with me, including financial & emotional goals and concerns. 
  • Care about my life and what I’m trying to accomplish. I need pain relief to be a parent, a worker, a partner, a contributor.
  • Chronic pain is expensive to manage when most health insurance benefit plans readily cover Rx, but only sometimes cover non-medication therapies. E.g. denial of physical therapy claims for on-going pain management relief. In an ideal scenario, health insurance would cover non-medication-centric pain management services as a matter of course, in parity with Rx coverage for the same condition.
  • Refer patients to integrated behavioral health support to address coping skills in recognition of the chronic pain and depression relationship.

Managing Pain

The bridge between evidence and personal expertise.

  • Managing pain is a continual experiment. Nothing works every time you’re in pain, including medication. You need several proven choices. 
  • I try to keep a journal of how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, and what works as I manage pain. It’s really hard to do when you’re in pain.
  • There are many therapeutic strategies that address the symptoms of physical pain and ways to interrupt the pain cycle and the experience of pain.  I wish I were an expert on the subject.  I know that there are some good answers available to people who struggle with chronic pain.   I believe that people need a combination of coaching and knowledge, as well as hands-on treatment, to benefit from these answers.

Doctors and Managing Pain

  • Doctors only know about drugs.  They can’t admit they don’t know about anything else that might work.
  • Doctors don’t have time for pain management. It can’t be done in occasional 20-minute visits.
  • Most of my questions about pain management occur when doctors aren’t available, like the middle of the night.
  • Technology is not a substitute for time and the relationship with my doctor.
  • I think we need to make the WHO pain ladder (cancer pain) one outcropping of a multimodal pain strategy but start with nonpharm, reorienting the meaning of pain, and subsidize multimodal pain plans before surgery and after injury.  As a pediatrician, pain researcher, inventor, innovator, and former procedural sedationist (I’ve pushed a LOT of fentanyl/propofol/ketamine), I’m much more interested in prevention and lowering the amount of opioids in circulation. 

Other Resources

  • We have an evidenced-based six-week peer-led pain self-management program that is widely used in the US, Canada and elsewhere. People can find locations near them by going to the Evidence-Based Leadership Council and clicking on the program locator on the upper right.
  • As part of The Pain Companion book launch, I’ve been on a number of excellent radio and TV shows recently talking about life with chronic pain and how we might find greater ease and well-being.
  • I recommend getting in touch with the British Pain Society. They are the organization that supports British Pain Clinics.  The Pain Clinics in the UK have embraced some of the complementary and alternative remedies that are quite helpful with pain management.   It is part of their standard protocol and clinic staff work with patients to implement these treatments.  

Suggestions and Questions

  • We should compensate doctors better for pain management discussions.
  • Why don’t we use palliative care specialists when patients have chronic pain? Palliative care is not just for the dying.
  • Pay post-op patients $200 to spend on a Pain Plan approved intervention if they don’t fill an opioid prescription. 
  • Give a list of evidence-based non-pharm options to every pre-op patient, and with every new opioid script.
  • Isn’t there a start-up in compiling non-medication pain management resources by zip code?
  • Why don’t we do more research about non-medication options for relieving pain?

Wow. Responses are still rolling in. Thanks to everyone. I am compiling these into a resource center that will include a pain management section. This is just the beginning of the conversation.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

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Aug 26 2018
Love2

More: Journal for Best Health

By ePatient

Julie Holliday, a reader of last week’s post, wrote:

I found this post very difficult to read. It sounded so interesting and I wanted to consider sharing it but just got lost in the dense sea of words. Could you consider making more paragraphs?_______________________________________________________________________

Ok, Julie. Here goes:

I seek best health for myself and others. I define best health as operating at peak performance as often as possible over time.  It’s living the best life possible given my genetics and biology, social circumstances, and physical environment – all of which are either out of my control or I have limited control. I can’t change my genetics, but with great difficulty, I could move somewhere else (physical environment). With less difficulty, I could increase my mobility with a handicapped public transportation pass (social circumstances).

However, sometimes I can control my medical care and more often I can change my individual behavior. Still, these are not easy and require planning, experimentation, and effort. The problem with chronic illness is that the opportunity to be thoughtful and try stuff out can be rare and short. Read More

Apr 29 2018
Love2

Failure is Under-Rated

By Advocate, Caregiver, ePatient, Leader, Musician, Researcher

I’ve told my teams over the years, if we don’t fail several times a week we’re not pushing the envelope and not doing our jobs. We weren’t tightrope walkers, pushing IV meds, or manufacturing artificial joints. We were innovators, learners, and leaders. Failure as a virtue is a hard sell – to almost anyone. My teams, my colleagues in leadership, editorial review boards always start by thinking I’m crazy.  Sometimes they eventually get it, sometimes not. Leadership usually wants to get A’s. In one health system I worked for, I reported that we successfully completed medication reconciliation in 40% of admissions. OMG, that’s awful! They said.  No, I said, that’s great! We’re failing. Let’s succeed. In 18 months we completed medication reconciliation 70% of the time.  It’s a lot harder to go from 70% to 80% than 40% to 70%. In research, we don’t publish when the study doesn’t prove the hypothesis. Yet, not proving is as important, if not more important, than proving. I was on an Editorial Review Board once that decided to solicit articles where the hypothesis wasn’t proven and something was learned. Over a 10-year span, we solicited exactly 0 such articles. Zero!

A definition of failure to some is the opposite of success. Not necessarily. Especially when it comes to learning and getting healthier. We don’t tell kids they fail when they fall learning to walk. They keep trying.  Same with learning to talk. As an adult, I find failure a motivator to try again.  As a thinker and a catalyst for change, I’m delighted when I succeed with 30% of what I try. It’s been the rare boss that’s accepted that. They’ve been the best bosses and we’ve done the best work together in my career.

For health, embrace failure. I did eye exercises twice a day for 8 months before my brain rewired and my crippling double vision cleared 80%. That’s 360 failures and one success! It’s taken years of trial and error to land on a balance, stretching, and strengthening routine that works for me. I stumble a lot, fall infrequently, and sustain only minor injuries when I do. I get frustrated when I see failure and stuck in the muck. Fail and try something else, that’s the ticket.

Failure flavors humility and empathy.  My best stories are of failure – my failures. People laugh with me.  We can all relate to failure. It’s the warp of our lives. Hearing about a failure, we naturally ask, and then? What happened next?  What did you learn? What did you try? What eventually worked?

So, failure, persistence, and humor are inseparable cronies. Keep trying and chuckle at the absurdity. That‘s life, health, music – anything worth doing well.  Persist and laugh. Eventually, who knows?

Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash

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Apr 08 2018
Love3

Lessons Learned as a Patient-Caregiver Activist

By Advocate

Photo by Monica Melton on Unsplash

Patient-caregiver activism spans my 40+ year career and my many hats. As the first male public health nurse in Western Massachusetts in 1976, I established a walking route in inner-city Holyoke with the Holyoke Visiting Nurses Association.  I strove to immerse myself in the community of people I supported. This more profound understanding of their physical environment and social circumstances help me help them manage their chronic illness – diabetes, heart failure, spinal cord trauma, and strokes. As an Intensive Care Unit nurse manager in the 80’s I introduced open visiting hours for families. Up to this point visiting hours were from 1-2 p.m. and 6-9 p.m. Nursing staff felt that family would be in the way.  So, on the one hand, my nursing staff would say with pride, we are patient advocates, and then limit family access to their loved ones. Made no sense to me. Working as Director of Quality Management in behavioral health managed care in the early 90’s, I was able to form clinician and patient advisory councils to inform us on the effects of our policies and practices on clinician and member lives.   When my son, Mike, was recovering from brain and then lung surgery from metastatic melanoma, we realized as a family that recovery depended on us with little support from the hospitals or medical community. I still had never heard of patient-centered or patient engagement.

Now, I am retired – no longer an employee or a boss – and immersed in writing, speaking, and consulting as a patient-caregiver activist. I collaborate with clinicians, researchers, academics, policy makers, caregivers, entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, administrators. I have the opportunity now to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned about the craft of patient-caregiver activism as a catalyst for change. Let me share some of those lessons:

Activism includes a set of skills and attitudes

  • Know my audience(s). Absorb like a sponge, introduce them to each other, and be a guest in their house(s).
  • Clarify language. Use as plain language as possible. Learn my audiences’ language. Delight in the Tower of Babel puzzle.
  • Build team relationships and hold up my end of the bargain. Maximize trust.
  • Find the story that opens minds and hearts to science and mission – people have different brains and respond to  information differently
  • Find seats at the table for the customers: patients, caregivers, and direct care clinicians.
  • Be clear about how I’ll recognize success in my work and the team’s.
  • Take three deep breaths often and keep at it. Relax and persist.
  • Don’t be afraid to blow the whistle for ethics. If I don’t speak up, who will?
  • Go for big gains and value the small ones. Celebrate often.
  • My family and self-care first.
  • Practice humor, humility, and listening.
  • Mentor as I’ve been mentored.
  • Appreciate that it’s all an experiment.  There is yet another way.

What lessons have you learned? Scroll down to bottom of the page to share.

 

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Mar 18 2018
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It’s not so simple – making treatment choices

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient

We (patients and clinicians) need all the help we can get making informed health care decisions. We need the right information to the right person, in the right format, through the right channel, at the right time in our life flow and workflow – The five rights. Let’s take managing acute pain as an example. Clearly, we need to make some decisions together. I (the patient) am in pain for whatever reason – hurt my back, migraines, colitis, sickle cell, a million reasons. I (the clinician) need to help my patient manage that pain with the least long-term risk possible, e.g. relief with maximum function without addiction, constipation, confusion, whatever. This pain could be new – never had it before, or familiar – chronic (we have experience with what works and what doesn’t). Clinical decision support can help us to structure and inform a routine to make choices based on research and clinical and life experience. What has worked for groups of people (those with acute back pain, migraines, colitis, sickle cell) and what has worked for the individual (me or my patient)? We can welcome this decision support when symptoms first occur, when the patient and clinician first communicate, when they first meet about the symptoms, or as we try treatments until the pain goes away or is manageable – anytime from first pain to living with pain to no pain. Read More

Mar 04 2018
Love2

Trust

By Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient, Family man

I trust my primary care doc.  I trust my neurologist. I trust my instincts. I trust my gut. I do. I trust my wife. She trusts me.  That certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t question almost everything each other says. Trust is not blind faith. Trust is NOT no second opinions. Trust is for when I’m in a crisis and I can’t think clearly, I will listen to my immediate family and my two lead docs (in that order) and I’m likely to do what they recommend… unless I’m unsure. Trust is for when I need to make a decision but can’t or don’t want to. And these are all people’s opinions about what I should do with my life. I know I should lose weight. People I trust say I should lose weight.  It takes a certain alignment of the stars for me to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds eight years ago when the stars were in alignment. They were in alignment again three weeks ago. I’ve started to lose the same 30 pounds again.

I’ve questioned my primary care doc about taking cholesterol-lowering meds.  She wants me to take them. I’m not so sure. The evidence appears pretty clear. I’ve been taking them for nine years because I trust her. Now with Medicare, they’re going to cost me more. It has me thinking again.  I still trust her.  I’ve stopped taking them.

I trusted my doctors for twenty-five years as they worked me up, over and over, for cardiac issues.  Now I know I have multiple sclerosis, not heart disease. I’m a trusting fellow until I’m not.

A friend of mine had breast cancer. She asked her doctors, “Should I take chemo?” They all said yes. She trusted that they wanted the best for her, but wondered where their trust in that advice came from? Was their research current, reliable, and apply to her as an individual? She did the chemo.

Webster says, Trust = you can rely on the integrity, strength, or ability of a person or thing. Trust is respect + communication + context. Making choices about your health in a bed of trust is hard enough. Making choices in the swamp of distrust can be crazy making.

As a person, I try to build trust – in relationships. It starts with being trustworthy. I feel better in that bed of trust. Still, trust in myself, ourselves, is key. Ultimately, it’s our lives.  We face the consequences of our decisions. I’m greatly relieved that I trust I can adjust and make a different choice if the one I made didn’t work out. Trust.

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Feb 25 2018
Love3
Clown and young lady smiling

Reading the Room and Yourself

By Advocate, Caregiver

Sometimes I feel like I’m part of someone else’s play. Just dropped in. I don’t know my lines, I don’t know the other characters. I think I’m in a drama, yet it feels like a farce. The stage is ever changing. Have you seen those round, rotating stages where the props keep changing? I think I’m playing myself, but I’m not quite sure. On top of it, I feel like crap, I’m exhausted, I’m cranky. I exit, stage right, left, whichever. What just happened? What do I do now? Oh yes, time to live life again.

When I worked at Boston Children’s Hospital, I took a class from the Big Apple Circus clowns. These are people who go from room to room visiting kids and their parents or go to scary procedures with them and help them feel better for a couple of minutes. The class was on reading the room. Sizing up the characters, the dynamic, the vibe in the room and then selecting a path forward. The kid is hurt, angry, and withdrawn. There’s tension between the hovering adults. What can you do? In seconds they insert themselves, do something odd or funny, draw out the child, and break the tension. Read More

Feb 04 2018
Love1

Health Hats: Reflecting on 2017

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, Leader, Researcher

Since I stopped being an employee or a boss two years ago I’ve written annual reports for myself. I had written ones for my boss and staff for 25 years straight. I thought I’d keep it up now that I’m retired from that. Helps me be sure that my work serves my mission. With so much to do in this sick, sickness industry, it’s easy to feel disappointed and burned out. Fortunately, I’ve made a career of beating low expectations – starting with something truly disappointing and finding the small thing that can have an outsized impact by moving that something a lasting inch. I call them levers for best health. I’ve found that drinking water has the most outsized impact for best health. Anyway, the annual report helps me keep a pulse on the balance between impactful work and stoking my fires while managing my health and having fun. It’s an inspiring strange ride. Thanks for being on the ride with me. I couldn’t do it without the personal inspiration of my immediate family (Ann, Simon, Ruben, Jessica, Kate, Anica, Jacky, Leon, and Oscar) and my friends (Mary Sue, Sue, Michael, Kathy, Fatima, Regina, John, Geri, MaryAnne, and Pat). Read More

Jan 14 2018
Love2

Eureka! Triggers and Signals

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient

When Liz found herself unwilling to floss, she knew that major depression was soon to follow. She’s going to need help.  She tells someone who knows how to help her before she loses the will to take any action. When I start to get dizzy, I know my MS symptoms will soon get worse.  Drinking water almost always helps. Water! Sometimes I feel like I’m going to cry. No real reason. Normal life. It’s a signal that I’m overtired. Nap or meditation is next.  It always works. If John feels stressed and bloated, a flare-up of his Crohn’s is soon to follow. He avoids certain food, takes acetaminophen, and stays near a bathroom. When Tiffany gets a rash she needs to see her doctor within a couple of days. If she has joint pain as well, it can’t wait a couple of days.  Tiffany has lupus.

Liz, John, Tiffany, and I recognize signals that trouble is coming and action is needed. We learned the signals because we are wired to take the step back and watch ourselves from a distance. We are mindful and curious about patterns. It takes time until the Eureka/recognition minute hits. None of our doctors ever asked us if we knew our signals or asked us about our patterns.  We are all four fortunate to have a friend or care partner who listens to our ramblings.  It’s during these ramblings, complaining, wondering, pattern-seeking, and problem-solving that we learned first one signal, then more. Two of us have clinicians that helped us figure out what to do once we told them about our signals. The other two tried stuff they learned from our advocacy associations and social media networks. We are so relieved to be building this tool chest of actions to take when we recognize signals. We are eager to discover more patterns and signals. It’s like turning over a rock and finding a twinkling gem.

Once we recognize a pattern, a signal, and an action that works, we can start to look for triggers. Triggers are stressors we know will be likely to cause a signal. Managing triggers is prevention. Liz, John, Tiffany, and I have a common set of triggers: emotional stress, inactivity, smoke inhalation, insufficient rest. We also have unique triggers.  They are many and varied.

Traditional doctor visits seldom contain routine time to learn about and discover signals, triggers, responses, and prevention. The electronic medical records seldom keep track of this learning, action, and response. It makes sense (silly, but makes sense). It’s time-consuming and it’s not in the many medical professionals’ training and workflow.  It’s up to us and our personal health team. I find that people who blog about their illness and their life challenges caused or made worse by their illness, almost always write about signals, triggers, and actions. You can find many on The Chronic Illness Bloggers here on Facebook. Liz, John, Tiffany, and I also keep track as we learn about what worked – Spreadsheets, journals, or blogging.

Not everyone has a pattern-seeking brain. Even if they do have a pattern-seeking brain, they may feel so bad that there’s little space to use it.  So it’s up to our care partner, our friends, our social network, to help us.  It’s liberating. It’s diagnosis agnostic (true for any chronic illness). It’s so totally worth the effort. What have you learned?

Dandelion Trigger Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

Pattern Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

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Dec 10 2017
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CEO of My Health Team

By Advocate, Caregiver, Clinician, ePatient, Family man, Leader, Researcher

I am the CEO (Chief Executive Officer, the boss) of my health team with a ton of subcontractors: my primary care doc and her practice, my neurologist and his practice, the radiology department at my local hospital, the neighborhood pharmacy, the utility companies… You get the idea. They get paid through my employment benefits, your and my taxes, and out of my pocket. Right now I directly employ my massage therapist and acupuncturist – fee-for-service. I also have pro bono team members: my wife (my care partner), my family, friends, and advisors.

As CEO of my health team, I try to lead and manage. Leading is building and fostering relationships, finding service providers as needed, setting health goals, coming up with a plan to meet my goals, and learning from our mistakes (what doesn’t work).  As a leader I find ways to share information among the team, and, of course, I fundraise and cheerlead. Leading is also about succession planning.  Who will lead when I can’t? Managing, on the other hand, is negotiating service agreements (contracts), actually seeing that the tasks in the plan happen as desired, maintaining the team and it’s connections, and trying to fix what isn’t working. It’s a tough system to lead and manage. It’s exhausting. I have some of the skills I need, but nowhere near all. There’s very little training for Health Team CEOs- no certificate or degree. The pay stinks. There’s no vacation. I can’t resign. Read More

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