Beyond Opioids - “we have to change the way we talk to people.”

Steven Stanos, DO, of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, participated in APTA's "Beyond Opioids" panel event. See the entire event at APTA.org/BeyondOpioids. Go to MoveForwardPT.com/ChoosePT to learn how physical therapists help patients manage pain and to access resources like the downloadable pain profile that helps patients have important treatment conversations with their health care providers.

I'll throw a disclaimer on it yet again: I don't want to minimize what it means to be in pain. At the same time, we have a culture where we want an immediate total fix to pain, from a mild headache to something much more severe. Is our cultural attitude about pain part of the thing we need to change? If you think of all of the commercials, everything we’re exposed to on a daily basis is 'you take your pill, you run down the beach, and you're smiling.' And ‘let pain be your guide; if you have pain, stop.’ I mean all those things we’re telling them is the wrong thing. So in some patients we don’t even ask them what their pain score is. ‘You wake up in the morning, what do you do?’ And you walk through and see from a functional standpoint what they’re doing throughout the day. We have to change the way we talk to people. Now for acute pain maybe your pain score is important. I think there’s been this push that the pain score’s not important. It’s important in a certain way, but you have to take it in the context of what else is going on with the patient.”