Patient-Centric Care in Rheumatic Disease: Alternative Approaches to Managing Pain

Announcer:
You’re listening to Living Rheum on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll discuss alternative approaches to managing pain in patients with chronic autoimmune diseases with Dr. Philip Mease. He’s the Director of Rheumatology Research at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and a Clinical Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Let’s hear from Dr. Mease now.

Dr. Mease:
The efforts that have been made in recent years to discover that this is part of virtually every chronic rheumatic disease is something that has been very valuable. This is very helpful because by creating this evidence base, we can then turn to teaching clinicians about this type of pain. We can also be in conferences with patients where we actually educate patients about the complexity of pain. And that can go a long way towards helping the problem as well.

Another area of research that is going to be important is looking for any blood biomarkers that can distinguish these forms of pain—I think that we’re going to be able to do that eventually—and bringing into a more practical position neuroimaging. That is functional MRI testing of the brain which can help guide us in this regard as well.

Physical therapy, occupational therapy, mindfulness training, biofeedback therapy, massage, acupuncture, psychologists—it’s very important for us to be able to have a village of practitioners that patients can work with to help improve their pain condition.

Pain is the most important symptom that patients describe when they have rheumatic disease, and it can significantly impact their quality of life, daily function, and ability to do the things they love to do. Being able to improve this and doing so in a safe and tolerable way, especially without using narcotic pain medication, is very important to getting people back to a more normal life.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Philip Mease talking about alternative approaches to managing pain in patients with chronic autoimmune diseases. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit ReachMD.com slash Living Rheum, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!