My last two blogs have been in relation to subjective & objective assessment. It feels right to have a closer look at the ‘planning’ stage of treatment plans.
Within the practice, we treat many patients with long term chronic pain, which some have been experiencing for anything between 10– 50 yrs. With these patients it can prove challenging to create meaningful, purposeful treatment plans.
In treating such people, their original problem can quickly become lost, as solving one area of pain will lead you to further areas of discomfort and pain in a completely different part of the body.
Once you have completed a subjective & objective assessment, you then begin to build a picture of what the issues are for your patient. Sometimes they have passed on so much information, gained through the subjective & objective information gathered, that clarity is needed as to what would be a good outcome for them from their perspective. This can often be different to the view the patient originally arrived with. It can be useful to revisit the aim/objective of the treatment regularly.
Treatment has to be flexible as the pain messages will change both in quality and areas of the body. Sometimes the plan is to increase mobility before the pain eases, as this, in our experience, often leads to calming down the autonomic nervous system.
Subsequently, we have to be open to short term plans, with space to revisit the objective assessment procedure, adapting your plan with the progression the patient makes. The ability to measure outcomes made within the treatments is important for both the patient to understand and recognise any progress made, and for you as the therapist to maintain focus on how to plan and move forward with treatments. Returning to objective assessment skills is a useful tool in enabling that process.