Join Chris Eccleston discussing the One Thing he wants people challenged by pain to know about. Explore the current state of pain science research and clinical practice in this straight-to-the-point interview with Chris.
About Prof Chris Eccleston
Chris is interested in how people make sense of physical experience, how action in pain and discomfort is shaped, and how rehabilitation in pain is informed by the social, cognitive, and emotional context. Chris works in five main areas of translational study: (1) evidence based pain; (2) cognitive factors in pain and analgesia; (3) treatment innovation; (4) child and family context, and (5) DTx for Pain. Here is his research profile.
Transcript
What is the one thing that you really want people challenged by pain to know?
The one thing I’d like people to know, is that we really need to think about pain as a public health problem. That, although it’s common, it’s certainly not trivial. And one of the problems of the sheer number of people who have pain, that’s 20% of all adults reporting chronic pain, we might run into the idea that somehow that, therefore it is not important when actually, each individual person with their chronic pain has a unique suffering, a unique journey that they have to navigate. And to understand all the losses that come with chronic pain, their loss of self respect, their loss of ability, their loss of life goals. And I really worry that sometimes when we’re talking about just how much pain there is, that somehow we might be teased into thinking that it’s just part of life, when it really isn’t. It’s something that we really need to have a public health response to.
What do you think, are the best steps we can take to address pain, in a public health way?
Well, I think so much of our understanding of pain needs to be developed further. So I’m a psychologist, and I’m interested in the way that individuals make sense of their experience and how we try to communicate our suffering to others. But just because we’re focused on the individual doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think more broadly about how individuals live, and what the influences on their lives are. So one of the things that I’m really interested in is the way in which we have an evolved capacity to diminish the suffering of other people. So what I mean by that is that we’re not particularly very good individually dealing with other people’s distress or other people’s pain or other people’s misery or other people’s suffering, we literally turn away from it, because we don’t understand how to manage or deal with it. And that evolved capacity, I think, it’s interesting, because it’s not because we’re mean, or difficult, or want to hurt other people. It’s just because we’re unskilled or we don’t know how to do it. Or we think that silence is better than speaking. And in many ways, I think one of the things that we need to do is to find public health solutions of small, psychological improvements that we can use on mass – that lots of people can use. I’ll give you an example. One of the public health campaigns that is commonly run around mental health problems in adults is to try and encourage people to think that listening is good. Actually, as a psychologist, I think listening is where things begin. And actually knowing what to do when somebody tells you that they’re distressed is as important if not more important, because encouraging people to talk and not knowing what to say when they tell you that about their suffering, can actually create more problems. So I think one of the things I’d like to do is to democratise and improve the public health, ability to respond to distress.
And how can you see things changing for a person experiencing pain? Should we do a better job at this?
Well, I think there’s good news, and bad news, right? So I think I think we do quite a good job. And I think there are a lot of healthcare professionals who, who really understand and can access and, and know what we’re talking about. The community is growing. Research has grown, we have some great scientists, we have some great clinicians who are working in this field, there’s just very few of us. So I think we need more investment, we need to think outside the box to be thinking about how to deliver evidence based interventions in new and fresh ways, using technology, training other people to do it. Using patient partners, we need to be building that community of interest. And getting away from the idea that talking about pain is somehow a weakness, or is somehow going to increase our suffering, or is somehow going to make us less competitive or in some way less human. I think the opposite is true. I think the more we talk about it, the more we learn to listen with humility, the more we learn to understand that other people’s suffering can make us stronger and make themselves stronger, the better off we’ll be as a society.
That’s a wonderful message. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.