Our British Pain Society takeover!

The British Pain Society’s Pain News has been taken over by the Flippin’ Pain team for its last issue.

The British Pain Society is one of the oldest and largest pain organisations in the UK. They work with healthcare professionals, pain specialists and those with lived experience to reduce the suffering of people enduring long-term and short-term pain. It will be no surprise to readers of Pain News that chronic pain is suffered by over a third of the population and has devastating, life altering affects for those burdened with it.

Cormac Ryan, Professor of Clinical Rehabilitation at Teesside University and Community Pain Champion for Flippin’ Pain took to the magazine to address how pain is not just a marker of tissue damage, but actually a complex subconscious phenomenon. Cormac then goes on to discuss the shift away from biomedical treatments and how important it is that all of this should be implemented across the healthcare sector.

He asks the important question:

“Why is there not more of a shift towards biopsychosocial practice in keeping with evidence-based guidelines?”

Lived experience participant Niki Jones, gave a emotional account of the debilitating pain she experienced for 16 years and how she made the shift from the many drugs she had been prescribed to effective self-management techniques. She wrote about the hopelessness she felt when she was told that there was no further medical treatment available and how self-managing pain changed her life:

“Prior to understanding pain, I’d endured 16 years of ‘intractable’ pain. I’d had multiple surgeries and a motor cortex stimulator (that helped a small amount) and then had been left, largely unattended, on high doses of opioids. When you are told there is nothing left to do, you don’t look any more.

[After developing an understanding of pain science,] I had control over so much that was influencing my pain experience and my suffering was transformative. I won’t say it’s simple – and it certainly hasn’t been easy – but it’s worth it.”

Members of The British Pain Society can catch up with the article below.