OTHER PAIN TREATMENTS: PSYCHOTHERAPY
This includes individual psychotherapy or group psychotherapy. Individual psychotherapy may offer help in changing the way someone feels about his or her pain, or alternatively to employ other supportive measures.
It may also seek to find the cause of the problem. These psychological approaches give both the practitioner and the patient time to explore the patient’s personality and behaviour patterns and also to determine how the patient’s perception of pain affects his or her life. It also helps to define, and measure, the emotional needs of the individual.
Group thorapy Group therapy is a treatment technique which uses the interaction of patients within a group to achieve the treatment goals.
In an in-patient or residential pain clinic, for example, group therapy includes all the interactions among patients. In-patients eat together, exercise together and encourage each other to act in normal ways. They are constantly interacting with one another and testing their new behaviour on new fellow patients and so eventually helping them to better understand how they cope with their pain.
The sharing of experiences and feelings, resulting from such group therapy, helps chronic pain patients to readjust their thinking and to develop new ways of coping with pain.
Such treatments are mainly available from registered psychologists, many of whom work in pain units.
*115\37\8*
Leave a Reply