The Biopsychosocial Model of Pain

At Integrative Pain Care we are passionate about helping our ACC pain service patients, referring practitioners and case owners understand the (little understood) biopsychosocial model of pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain states that pain is a ‘sensory and emotional experience’ and must be viewed from a biopsychosocial perspective. The experience of pain is part biomedical (the initiating injury or event), psychological (our reaction and beliefs about the injury), and social (the impact of where we live and work, combined with cultural values). Dr George Engel who first proposed this model in 1977 stated that clinicians should be able to consider all these variables simultaneously (rather than they being worked on in isolation by different practitioners). Psychosocial factors are well documented as the most significant obstacles to recovery (the subject of Dr Nick Penney’s doctoral thesis) and as such these must be addressed early in any claim that is over eight weeks old. There are some 250 biopsychosocial variables previously identified that prevent or delay recovery. In future newsletters we will highlight some of the more common factors including stress, distress, anxiety and depression.

At Integrative Pain Care we offer an Inter-disciplinary approach to pain management. Far from teaching people to live well with pain we follow the evidence that suggests the goal is to teach people to live well without pain. All our clinicians understand the biopsychosocial model and are, with the exception of interventional pain management, available at one site.

‘Integrative Pain Care: Guiding the journey back from patient to person’