Pain Guidebook
Recovery Strategies – Pain Guidebook by Greg Lehman is a straight forward 71 page free PDF that is designed to help both therapists and individuals with pain and injuries.
The book is composed of 4 sections:
- Pain Principles (the mechanisms of pain)
- Key Messages about pain and human resiliency
- Pain Contributors: a series of posts looking at common factors that influence pain
- Recovery Strategies: a guide to help patients and therapists implement some of the concepts in the book. It helps people create a self audit of their pain contributors and then choose and implement a plan to address those contributors
What is unique about the book is that almost every page from the first 3 sections can be considered a stand-alone infographic. Each page has one simple message that might be helpful to learn a bit about pain, risk factors for pain or about how we heal and recover from pain and injuries. Some special topics might be the role of habituation, graded exposure, sitting posture, strength or psycho-emotional factors. This is great for therapists because they can print off specific pages that might be most relevant for their own patients. A drawback to this approach is that there is some redundancy but repeating a message certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Therapists are free to download a copy and print either pages of the book or the whole guidebook and pass these out to their patients. Patients are also encouraged to download the workbook themselves.
About the author
Greg Lehman is a physiotherapist, chiropractor, middling researcher and continuing education educator (Reconciling biomechanics with pain science). Greg’s career in health care started with a MSc in Spine Biomechanics where he researched the mechanisms of manual therapy and exercise biomechanics. Fortunately, Greg was introduced to the biopsychosocial model of pain and injury at this time as well as some excellent clinician researchers who challenged and researched many of the dogmas of our professions. In clinical practice Greg recognises that the biopsychosocial model is of importance in all conditions and believes in treating with as wide a net as possible to address a multitude of factors. Here is his website