{"id":216594,"date":"2021-02-16T07:30:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T02:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=216594"},"modified":"2021-02-19T02:45:32","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T21:15:32","slug":"the-influence-of-verbal-suggestions-in-the-management-of-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-influence-of-verbal-suggestions-in-the-management-of-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"The Influence Of Verbal Suggestions In The Management Of Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Piumi Nakandala –<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Piumi Nakandala<\/p><\/div>\n

Pain can be defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with or resembling that associated with actual or potential tissue damage (IASP, 2020). Pain can be resulted as a consequence of repetitive daily activities which stress various systems, acute trauma or various musculoskeletal and neurological disorders. It is a debilitating symptom which has created considerable impacts clinically, socially and economically worldwide. Chronic pain places extensive burden on patients and their family members exerting negative influences on perception towards general health.It also may lead to depressive symptoms and as well as may further interfere with poor social interactions. It is estimated that the cost for the management of non-oncological chronic pain may range between 34 and 635 billion dollars per year in Australia and USA (Henschke et al., 2015; Economics, A., 2007). It is found that only 30% of the pain sufferers are reacting to the treatments such as injections, surgery and physical rehabilitation (Turk et al., 2011) where most of the patients with chronic pain are not responding to the conventional treatments. Therefore the discovery of new treatment approaches which enhance the therapeutic benefits in terms of pain is a necessity in the clinical set up. As a point of fact, patient\u2019s expectations towards the pain relief is a substantial predictor in the analgesic treatments (Cormier et al., 2016) where it is found that the expectation of pain relief can directly cause actual pain relief. Three common interventions that are executed to induce expectations in the clinical set up are verbal suggestions, conditioning and imagery strategies. In particular, these expectation interventions are triggering placebo effects where expectancy is known to be a core mechanism (Kirsch, 1997; Price et al., 2008). The effect of verbal suggestion in pain relief is more frequently studied in literature. Therefore, this review primarily focuses on the impact of verbal suggestions in the management of pain in pain sufferers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Verbal suggestions<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Cuyul-V\u00e1squez et al., (2019) have defined verbal suggestion as a communication process to convey the information about certain concepts and information to others and thereby to provoke beliefs, expectations, thoughts, emotions, behaviors or physical states in them consciously or unconsciously. It is a contextual factor which influences the therapeutic outcome by triggering placebo or nocebo effects (Wager and Atlas, 2015). Verbal suggestions are known to be strongly related with the hypnotic process where it induces alterations in patient\u2019s sensations, feelings, perceptions and actions (Lynn and Kirsch, 2005). It is shown that the verbal suggestions are producing positive therapeutic results with regard to pain relief by inducing a placebo effect in pain sufferers (Testa and Rossettini, 2016; Morral et al., 2017). Verbal suggestions can be used to generate either positive or negative expectations. Positive expectations are related with positive anticipation towards the need of pain relief where negative expectations are associated with negative anticipation towards the treatment outcomes by means of fear or anxiety. These are directly related with placebo effects and nocebo effects respectively. It is identified that when positive verbal suggestions are integrated with other treatment regimes to manage pain, it gives better hypoalgesic results (Koban et al., 2017).Further, it is found that when positive verbal suggestions are combined with professional empathy, it may even increase the analgesic effect while neutral verbal communication combined with low levels of empathy has worsened the treatment outcomes (Rossettini et al., 2018; Mistiaen et al., 2016). This emphasizes the significance of patient-therapist interaction, communication style and it will positively cause the patient to stick into the treatment process successfully and in turn will enhance the satisfaction of the patient regarding the treatment. In literature, the clinical studies focusing on musculoskeletal pain have emphasized the importance of this effective and low cost strategy (Louw et al., 2016; Hsiao\u2010Wei Lo et al., 2016). \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n