Chronic pain is a leading and growing cause of personal suffering and societal burden, with annual costs above $50 billion per year. Musculoskeletal health conditions, such as back pain and arthritis, are the leading cause of chronic pain and disability. Exercise-based rehabilitation programs are recommended for these conditions, but many patients experience increasing pain during these treatments and fail to improve. There are currently no clinical tools that are specifically designed to help health professionals predict which patients will and won't benefit from these types of treatments. There is also a lack of knowledge about how health professionals should be trained to effectively manage pain.
This program of research is expected to improve the clinical management of pain by testing whether newly developed clinical tools can better predict which patients are least likely to respond to traditional exercise-based rehabilitation programs and by testing alternate treatments that might be more beneficial. It will also help improve the quality and consistency of pain management training for physiotherapy students across Canada by developing and testing new curricula on pain. Findings from this research program are expected to directly improve the lives of Canadians living with pain by creating more personalized healthcare and by improving the training of their health professionals.