What do patients value learning about pain? A mixed-methods survey on the relevance of target concepts after pain science education

Key Points

1. Pain education seeks to address common misconceptions around pain.

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BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE

Education has become a prominent part of many treatment guidelines around common musculoskeletal (MSK) complaints (1). Pain education seeks to address common misconceptions around pain, such as, pain is always a sign of tissue damage that can lead to worse outcomes. Reconceptualising pain can also lead to better engagement with other treatment guidelines, such as to remain active.

Pain science education seeks not only to provide new information, but also to challenge existing potentially unhelpful beliefs around pain. Pain education interventions use target concepts that form learning objectives around pain. Currently it is unknown which of these target concepts are most important to people living with pain.

The purpose of this paper was to clarify which of these target concepts were identified as useful for those who improved after pain education.

Pain science education seeks not only to provide new information, but also to challenge existing potentially unhelpful beliefs around pain.

Identifying key themes that are deemed helpful may help clinicians be more targeted and efficient when using education.

METHODS

This was a convergent mixed methods piece of research that involved quantitative methods employed to rank target concepts, and a qualitative component to investigate the perspective of the patient. This study involved people who were at least 16 and had

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