Dr. Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist and professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine where she teaches pain education for medical residents. She is the co-president of the American Association of Pain Psychology and serves on the board of the Society of Pediatric Pain Medicine. She is an author of two books, writer for Psychology Today and is a 2021 Mayday Fellow developing integrative pain programs around the world.
Rachel begins with describing pain psychology and the importance of the biopsychosocial model integrated into pain medicine. This topic has a gread focus for physical therapists because she describes the role of non pharmacological and biobehavioral treatments for pain.
There is a nature of pain and health. Rachel emphasizes why we must target cognitive, emotional, behavioral, perceptual, contextual, social, and sociological familial factors in addition to the biomedical model when treating our patients with pain.
Rachel has the evidence to provide how healthcare providers can learn to use CBT-based tools from books even though never trained in this area.
Follow Rachel on Twitter @drzoffness and head over to her website zoffness.com.
PARTING SHOT
1:11:32 “Pain is never a purely physical experience, it’s emotional too. If we continue to treat pain from a purely biomedical perspective, we are missing 2/3 of the pain problem.” – Rachel Zoffness