I spent a bit of time thinking about how people’s beliefs about pain have an impact. The main issue that I wanted to explore would be around exploring societal beliefs about pain. However, this would be an epic study. So I decided to break it down a bit. Having a look at the current discussions, I decided that it would be interesting to explore this from a health care professional’s perspective. Particularly exploring biomedical versus more sociological perspectives. Previous work has been done showing that health care professionals beliefs about back pain affect their advice to patients. This can be in direct contrast with current guidelines or clinical evidence (Houben et al 2005 available at doi:10.1016/j.ejpain.2004.05.002). This was done using a structured questionnaire which may have limited the breadth of responses that could have been explored. I would like to apply a more qualitative method to the same topic and widening it to be around beliefs about pain.
Information about pain can be complex and the ideas around chronic pain are sometimes counterintuitive. For example, that pain does not always indicate damage and that engaging in physical activity and social roles despite experiencing pain is still helpful. As this is in contrast to much popular and medical thinking it would be helpful to find out if this is in fact the case.
Research question
What are healthcare professionals’ beliefs about pain?
Topic Guide
General beliefs about pain
Beliefs around helpfulness of pain
The relationship between pain and damage
Mind and body dualism
Ideas around malingering and ‘psychosomatic’ pain
Effect of culture and society
I've left the ideas quite open so as not to narrow the scope of the eventual questions too much but to allow a broad exploration around these areas.
Thanks,
Jackie