| Chronic pain develops gradually. The journey down a path to daily suffering and loss often starts with a simple injury and cascades innocently downward with continued pain, imperfect healing, medical complications and failures, loss of job, loss of financial support, loss of friends, and depression. The progress along this pathway occurs in steps. Steps of declining hope, increasing suffering and increasing fear define the journey. The treatment of this decline from chronic pain must also be along a path. We call this path a clinical path. |
 The optimal timing and integration of the Interdisciplinary services necessary to provide an efficient clinical pathway for your recovery is the unique work of our experts here at HELP. Your treatment begins with our comprehensive evaluation services. Evaluation services are the first step. Structured interviews, standards testing, observation, direct examination and review of your available medical records are the foundation for building the most comprehensive picture possible of your personal journey of developing chronic pain. By understanding how you got here we can see how we need to help you to begin the journey to a productive and fufilled life.
Interdisciplinary clinical pathways are designed to help patients recover. These paths include all facets of the decline and are linked in a continuous fashion. Understanding pain is a first step in the pathway of treating chronic pain. Patients learn what is causing their pain and how pain can persist despite the injured tissues having healed. Patients learn that pain is real. Enen though the pain is real, it may not mean there is a new and progressive risk. Pain results from old and imperfect tissues that have replaced previously healthy tissues. Each of these learning steps build from the previous learning to create the progressive steps out of the darkness of pain into the light of understanding. Each of these steps is called an event. We use event based treatment to provide the usual time and resources necessary to let you learn what you need to learn through medical, psychological, physical or spiritual changes that improve your condition. With each treatment event we choose a measurement of attainment and follow that measurement until we have attained the goal which allows you to move on to the next event.
Event after event will build into a patients treatment experience. Some of the events that patients need may occur only in a hospital like the event of medication detoxification, while other events require one on one teaching with a doctor like reviewing your diagnostic studies to help you learn why your injury still hurts even though your body has healed. Other lessons can occur at home or with other health care providers. Learning to set your goals based on what you life priorities are is a lesson that can be taught over the phone. Event based treatment to help patients integrate weekly goal setting and daily activity monitoring can be taught with remote support in your home. Event based treatment means using the correct resources in the correct environment to optimally treat your condition. As the events are linked in time the progress of your treatment in the clinical path occurs. Each patient becomes their own true story of injury, pain, loss, enlightenment and recovery. |