How a travel PT interacts with patients could reduce their pain

Pain and patients are perhaps the most common bedfellows. Though often regarded as a nemesis of healing, pain is a misunderstood helping agent that signals when the body is in trouble. On the whole, that sensory feeling of distress is what most travel physical therapy and nursing professionals try to treat every day.

Interestingly, research suggests that simply understanding pain can improve an individual's ability to manage pain and reduce its negative impact on daily life. What's more, how you interact with a patient could alter his or her perception of recovery.

A new perspective on pain
In a Moving Forward Physical Therapy broadcast earlier this year, two experts delved further into how pain works. Our understanding of pain has shifted over the years, and while we used to think that "ouch" feeling existed at a tissue level, it's now accepted that pain doesn't exist until the brain determines it exists.

The medical staffing world has also moved away from the gate-control theory model. As older travel PT specialists may recall from physical therapy school, the gate-control theory said that pain signals were sent to the brain. We had fast and slow signals, and these pain signals would translate into what sort of pain an individual feels; slow signals were thought to bring on dull aches, and fast signals would bring on a sharp, shooting feeling.

However, this school of thought has since been revised: It's not pain signals that are being relayed up to the brain, but rather danger signals that the brain then interprets to send out the pain feeling.

For example, pretend a man is walking in the forest and scratches his knee. At this moment, information moves from the knee all the way up to the brain merely as an input – pain does not exist yet. The neuromatrix, which includes different portions of the brain that communicate with one another, instantaneously analyzes the information and ascertains whether it needs to send an output of pain to defend him. If the brain thinks there's enough information to indicate that the tissues could potentially be damaged, then it will send an output of pain to those tissues.

Significance of new concept of pain
The portions of the brain that make up the neuromatrix also are related to emotion. If the man in the example was having a bad day before walking in the forest, his brain might actually be more defensive when he scratches his knee. Or, if the man has a comorbidity of anxiety and depression, his brain is more defensive already and may send pain signals regardless of the amount of input.

Because the brain is intimately involved in pain, a lot of different variables come into play to determine if pain will in fact exist. Crucially for medical staffing specialists, societal interactions can influence the brain's pain output. That means the interaction between you and a patient can affect his or her perception of pain.

This concept is called therapeutic alliance. If a patient trusts you, he or she may be more likely to believe in the recovery treatment you provide. So, if a patient reports low back pain even though previous tests have shown no tissue damage, the way you connect with them could potentially make a difference in their recovery by influencing how the brain responds in its perception of pain.

As a result, a travel physical therapy professional's interaction with a patient is extremely important, and likely may influence the results to a degree comparable to the intervention itself.

Society can influence pain
To further emphasize the role of the brain's perception of pain, where we live can alter how we feel pain: The U.S. makes up 4 percent of the world's population, yet consumes 80 percent of narcotic pain medication. The immense discrepancy reflects a greater picture that shows that Americans feel, respond to, handle and treat pain differently than the rest of the world. As one piece of the puzzle, the society and culture we live in can shape individuals' experiences of pain.

As new research continues to surface, those on travel PT and travel nurse jobs should make note that their trust-worthy interactions with patients could potentially assist in their recovery.