Occupational Therapy and Chronic Pain Management: Fibromyalgia

Presented by Megan Kenney

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Video Runtime: 24 Minutes; Learning Assessment Time: 42 Minutes

This course will highlight biopsychosocial approaches to chronic pain management and examine the interaction and relationship between physical, functional, and emotional factors affecting individuals with fibromyalgia. Intervention strategies using the biopsychosocial approach will be presented, detailing how to address the multifactorial nature of chronic pain conditions. This course will describe a framework that can be applied when working with individuals with chronic pain in various settings and will be beneficial and most applicable to nurses, occupational therapists, and physical therapists working with individuals with chronic pain in acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, long-term care, home health, and outpatient settings.

Meet your instructor

Megan Kenney

Megan Kenney is an occupational therapist who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Health and Rehab Science Occupational Therapy program in 2012. She currently works with UPMC Centers for Rehab Services as the chronic pain program director and assistant outpatient occupational therapy program director.…

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Chapters & learning objectives

The Biopsychosocial Nature of Chronic Pain for the Individual With Fibromyalgia

1. The Biopsychosocial Nature of Chronic Pain for the Individual With Fibromyalgia

This chapter will introduce the biopsychosocial model and will explain why it is important to address chronic pain intervention using this approach—specifically, why it’s important to look at these factors when working with individuals with fibromyalgia. The biopsychosocial model describes a holistic, macro view of the client/patient relationship versus focusing on impairment-based intervention or acute-based intervention (remediation) that we typically see in the medical model or the traditional model of care, where it’s expected that intervention will return the client/patient to their baseline, which is assumed to be normal.

Contributing Factors: Physical, Functional, and Emotional

2. Contributing Factors: Physical, Functional, and Emotional

This chapter will describe the multifactorial nature of chronic pain, explaining the importance of addressing factors affecting the client’s experience with pain, including physical, functional, and emotional changes or deficits. This is important to help learners understand that intervention is typically less successful or unsuccessful if approaching chronic pain from one perspective alone.

Intervention That Addresses the Needs of the Individual With Fibromyalgia

3. Intervention That Addresses the Needs of the Individual With Fibromyalgia

This chapter will use the framework of the biopsychosocial approach and the concepts of the multifactorial nature of chronic pain to inform a comprehensive intervention for an individual with fibromyalgia. The intervention example will use chair yoga as a strategy to reduce fear of movement, partnered with routine creation and goal attainment scaling to assist the individual in creating reasonable goals for herself. Demonstration will highlight a therapist walking the client through education on how to improve body awareness, reduce fear of movement, and incorporate safe movement patterns into a routine with effective goal creation. This is important to demonstrate how the concepts from chapter 1 and chapter 2 can be applied in a real-life setting.