Supplementing care with online tutorials could be an effective way to reduce patients' need for face-time with physicians, while still providing quality pain management care, according to a study published in the Journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain.
Researchers found that patients suffering from chronic pain who used The Pain Course, a free web-based education program designed to provide information about chronic pain and teach practical skills for pain management, experienced improved pain management regardless of how much contact they had with physicians, even after the study concluded.
Here are five things to know about the research.
1. Researchers recruited 490 adults who had seen a physician for pain assessment within the three months leading up to the study.
2. Participants were divided into three treatment groups while receiving the web-based Pain Course — one group had regular contact with clinicians during their course, another had optional contact and the third had only emergency contact.
3. The regular contact group averaged 68 minutes of contact with clinicians over the eight-week course. The optional group had 13 minutes and the emergency contact group averaged five minutes.
4. At the finish of the program, patients across the three groups reported average reductions of at least 18 percent in disability, 32 percent for anxiety, 36 percent for depression and 12 percent for typical pain levels. Level of patient-physician interaction made no significant difference in improvement.
5. The researchers reported these improvements were sustained for three months with no significant differences between the intervention groups based on how much contact they had with clinicians.
"While face-to-face pain management programs are important, many adults with chronic pain can benefit from programs delivered via the internet," Blake Dear, a psychology researcher at Macquarie University in New South Wales and lead study author, told Reuters in an email. "Many of them do not need a lot of contact with a clinician in order to benefit."