The EIM pain science team has another paper published this month, this one in Psychological Disorders and Research. Their study examined the effects of a two-hour pain neuroscience education (PNE) lecture on the treatment choices of 29 physician assistant students.
Here are some key takeaways:
- After PNE, there was a significant shift of decreasing the choice of medical interventions/pharmaceutical use and increasing alternative pain strategy interventions.
- Non-pharmaceutical treatments shifted towards cognitive and active movement approaches (mindfulness, relaxation, physical therapy, psychology and cognitive behavioral medicine), away from passive treatments (massage therapy and chiropractic).
- After PNE, PA students were less likely to recommend an orthopedic surgeon to treat chronic pain (p = 0.015).
- Conclusion: A PNE lecture to PA students is able to decrease pharmaceuticals as first choice in treatment of chronic pain and towards more active, non-pharmaceutical cognitive targeted treatments.
You can access the paper here or read the full paper here.
© 2020 Nicholas Maiers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.31487/j.PDR.2020.02.03
