By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“What kind of therapy is beneficial? What are the specific components of therapy most applicable to people with chronic pain? I can tell you that mindfulness, CBT, and ACT based interventions are definitely part of the equation, i.e., they are always helpful. In fact, mindfulness practice is often a necessary component of healing.” – Howard Schubiner, MD
We all have to deal with pain. It’s inevitable, but hopefully mild and short lived. For many, however, pain is a constant in their lives. Chronic pain affects a wide swath of humanity. At least 100 million adult Americans have common chronic pain conditions. The most common treatment for chronic pain is drugs. These include over-the-counter analgesics and opioids. But opioids are dangerous and prescription opioid overdoses kill more than 14,000 people annually. Fortunately, there are alternative treatments. Mindfulness and yoga practices have been shown to improve pain. A therapeutic technique that includes mindfulness training called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has been shown to be effective in treating a number of physical and psychological disorders and has been shown to successfully improve acceptance of chronic pain, pain intensity, satisfaction with life, and physical functioning in patients with chronic pain.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a mindfulness based psychotherapy technique that focuses on the individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior and how they interact to impact their psychological and physical well-being. ACT employs mindfulness practices to increase awareness and develop an attitude of acceptance and compassion in the presence of painful thoughts and feelings. Additionally, it teaches individuals to “just notice”, accept and embrace private experiences and focus on behavioral responses that produce more desirable outcomes. At its core, ACT is targeted at increasing psychological flexibility, which is an ability to modify behavior based upon conscious and open contact with thoughts, feelings, and sensory experiences, and in a manner that reflects the individual’s values and goals.
An impediment to widespread adoption of various psychotherapy techniques, including ACT, is that they require a trained professional therapist and attendance at scheduled therapy sessions. This can make the treatments expensive and inconvenient. The internet holds great promise to deliver therapy inexpensively and conveniently to large numbers of people spread across wide geographic areas. Mindfulness training has been successfully conducted over the internet with positive benefit. ACT has been successfully has been delivered on-line reducing depression. So, on-line ACT training appears to be a viable method for treatment.
In today’s Research News article “Positive Psychological Wellbeing Is Required for Online Self-Help Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Chronic Pain to be Effective.” See:
or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4786566/
Trompetter and colleagues investigate the effectiveness of ACT, delivered on-line, to treat chronic pain and what variable might predict the kinds of patients who are most likely to have positive responses to ACT. They recruited patients suffering from chronic pain and randomly assigned them to either receive 12-weeks of on-line ACT treatment or Expressive Writing Treatment or to a waitlist control group. They measured pain and pain interference in daily life before and after treatment and 3 months after the conclusion of treatment. Before treatment they also measured demographic variables, pain intensity, pain disability, psychological distress, and mental health.
They found that ACT produced a significant reduction in pain interference in daily life and that this effect was moderated by the psychological well-being of the participants. That is, that participants with high levels of psychological well-being had much greater benefit from ACT than those at lower levels. There were no other significant predictors of benefit. These results suggest that ACT conducted on-line can be effective in reducing the interference from pain in the conduct of the daily lives of chronic pain patients. This is important as on-line presentation can greatly increase the scalability, affordability, and convenience of treatment for the huge numbers of chronic pain patients. The results further indicate that on-line ACT should be used primarily for patients who have moderate to high levels of psychological well-being at the beginning.
So, ACT on-line to reduce chronic pain.
“Overall, it appears that the cognitive-behavioral approach has a positive effect when combined with active treatments such as medications, physical therapy, and medical treatments for chronic pain clients in treating pain, thoughts about pain, and pain behavior problems.” – Carrie L. Winterowd
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Trompetter, H. R., Bohlmeijer, E. T., Lamers, S. M. A., & Schreurs, K. M. G. (2016). Positive Psychological Wellbeing Is Required for Online Self-Help Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Chronic Pain to be Effective. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 353. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00353
Abstract
The web-based delivery of psychosocial interventions is a promising treatment modality for people suffering from chronic pain, and other forms of physical and mental illness. Despite the promising findings of first studies, patients may vary in the benefits they draw from self-managing a full-blown web-based psychosocial treatment. We lack knowledge on moderators and predictors of change during web-based interventions that explain for whom web-based interventions are especially (in)effective. In this study, we primarily explored for which chronic pain patients web-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was (in)effective during a large three-armed randomized controlled trial. Besides standard demographic, physical and psychosocial factors we focused on positive mental health. Data from 238 heterogeneously diagnosed chronic pain sufferers from the general Dutch population following either web-based ACT (n = 82), or one of two control conditions [web-based Expressive Writing (EW; n = 79) and Waiting List (WL; n = 77)] were analysed. ACT and EW both consisted of nine modules and lasted nine to 12 weeks. Exploratory linear regression analyses were performed using the PROCESS macro in SPSS. Pain interference at 3-month follow-up was predicted from baseline moderator (characteristics that influence the outcome of specific treatments in comparison to other treatments) and predictor (characteristics that influence outcome regardless of treatment) variables. The results showed that none of the demographic or physical characteristics moderated ACT treatment changes compared to both control conditions. The only significant moderator of change compared to both EW and WL was baseline psychological wellbeing, and pain intensity was a moderator of change compared to EW. Furthermore, higher pain interference, depression and anxiety, and also lower levels of emotional well-being predicted higher pain interference in daily life 6 months later. These results suggest that web-based self-help ACT may not be allocated to chronic pain sufferers experiencing low levels of mental resilience resources such as self-acceptance, goals in life, and environmental mastery. Other subgroups are identified that potentially need specific tailoring of (web-based) ACT. Emotional and psychological wellbeing should receive much more attention in subsequent studies on chronic pain and illness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4786566/