“My Meds Could Kill Me”: Reclaiming Life After 60 Years of Pain with Ann Livingstone

i um have been also recently influenced by a young, young to me, physiotherapist here in our neck of the wood, Joe Barry.

I've talked to him about the need to upstream, i.e. most people living with pain.

There isn't an intervention until I believe the pain is so established and with all that goes with it, all that limitation and negativity and loss of yourself.

But if you can capture by upstreaming before all of that has got settled, into a mindset, that would be great.

And I have spoken recently to a GP surgery, and I think I was a little bit disappointed that they weren't as enthusiastic as I am about upstreaming.

I know that there's a difficulty when you upstream.

And if you take the cut between acute and chronic persistent, three months, 12 weeks or whatever, i.e. if they're on painkillers it's usually that third prescription but eve is that too late should an intervention be as somewhat as soon as someone mentions oh my goodness you know i've been living with this back pain for so many weeks almost before i believe that there's a um an x-ray done or referral, because if the person feels the pain, the pain is real to them.

Regardless of what a x-ray or an MRI or comes up with or doesn't come up with, And I feel that personally, that that's where I want to be going now, is because of my experience, I want to be capturing people who have say, oh, I've got back pain, I've had it for two or three weeks, or can't get rid of this cluster migraine or whatever.

Because I think the earlier they get support, and it doesn't have to be clinical support, I think there's a chance they will not go down that rabbit hole I went down.

And I genuinely feel that that's where one of the focuses I want us, me and my team, to be working on.

Because I think that the sooner we... can support people and give them skills and tips and a bit of education, a little bit of basic pain science.

I mean I'm not a clinician, none of our facilitators are that I work alongside.

I think the more chance we've got of not having this, what I almost think is an epidemic of chronic pain, or I see as an epidemic of chronic pain, of people having to give up their employment, giving up their hobbies, losing family and friends, becoming isolated.

And so consequently, I think upstreaming to get people as soon as we can, to support them before clinical intervention, because that often takes quite a while, is where we should be.

But that's my dream.

That's I have a dream.

That's my I have a dream moment.

I couldn't agree more.

And I think that the three month thing is a totally arbitrary number that is based around tissue healing time.

And I think it fundamentally misunderstands what chronicity is about.

And I think that there are ways of identifying conditions for chronicity and identifying conditions for potential recovery.

And so if somebody has a very simple injury and they have no factors which suggest that this might be a risk of becoming chronic, then you can probably take the approach that we're taking at the moment, and that's absolutely fine.

And so I don't think that it's 100% of the time a problem by any means to treat somebody's pain as chronic.

something that is likely to go away fairly quickly.

Beyond that, persistent pain is not about tissue healing.