Here at PCET we are finding that more and more people are coming to us asking for ways to help with pain that don’t involve being prescribed opioids (narcotics). Many people are finding in this time when so many doctors don’t want to prescribe opioids and when being on opioids involves pill counts, drug screens and monthly visits, it’s just getting to be hassle to be prescribed opioids. They also don’t work as well as we would all like. They don’t take the pain away – and the side effects can be numerous and problematic. So patients and doctors alike are searching for non-opioid alternatives in the treatment of chronic pain.
To help with this, PCET will be offering a new pain psychology group to help people find alternatives (or supplements) to help with pain. The new group is called “Toolbox” and it will offer just what it sounds like: a handful of different tools to help deal with pain. We have offered “Pain Pearls” for several years – a single pain psychology session to introduce some skills. Toolbox goes a step further.
Toolbox will meet every Monday from 10:30 to noon. In each group we will have a session (lecture and discussion) on a pain topic. There are four major lecture topics so the curriculum is covered in four weeks. The group also offers the opportunity to continue and repeat the sessions again if you like (and your insurance agrees). Not only will we have lecture and discussion on four pain topics, we will then offer “centers” (if you’re sure what that is, ask your grandchildren about “centers”). When we start Toolbox next month we will have three centers, and we hope to add more as we go along. There will be two virtual reality (VR) centers where people can experience VR for about 20 minutes. Our studies have shown that VR cuts pain by about two thirds and has some analgesia even after the session is over. The other center will be a relaxation center. We will give participants a CD to listen to that uses binaural sound to enhance the relaxation experience. If that is all not enough, we will give each participant a free copy of the book “The Opioid-Free Pain Relief Kit: Ten Simple Steps to Ease Your Pain” by Stanford pain psychologist Beth Darnall (just published this month). This book will supplement what we cover in our sessions and can offer you as much homework as you care to do to learn more skills to deal with your pain.
So Toolbox will over more time to learn about ways to cope with pain, a chance to use some new pain coping tools here in the office and a free book to take home and learn even more. The motto of Toolbox is “High Teach, High Tech.” We will be using pain coping tools that have been just released. In fact, our using VR for pain makes PCET the first practice in the nation to use VR clinically for chronic pain. Here at PCET we want to offer the newest and best non-opioid pain coping tools available. And you can have access to them if you join us for Toolbox. (This is a psychology group service and will be billed to your insurance).
So if you are a patient at PCET, call or ask your practitioner about entering the Toolbox group. It will be an ongoing group so you can join later if now is not a good time for you. If you are not a patient at PCET, give us time and await the results of this group, the first of its kind in the nation. We have high hopes that it can help people with their chronic pain in a substantive way, and we look forward to starting this up sometime in the next month.
