Isle of Wight Chronic Pain Service

This is an 8-week psychology led programme that is intended to help improve your emotional wellbeing and learn skills to cope with pain. It covers topics such as modern pain understanding, the impact of stress, the impact of negative thoughts, mindfulness and relaxation, emotional resilience and assertiveness. It is usually delivered online.

This 6-week programme helps people to understand chronic pain and aims to reduce anxiety about pain and increase activity levels thus improving quality of life. The programme promotes self-management techniques and covers a range of topics including pacing, managing stress, learning relaxation strategies, improving sleep, mindfulness, movement-based activities such as Tai Chi and setting value-based goals.       

This is a 3-week programme to help understand Fibromyalgia and the strategies that can help to reduce the impact of it. It comprises of two 2-hour group sessions followed by an optional one to one review appointment. This is usually run online but if this is difficult you can request a face-to-face group. You may be referred directly to this by your GP or you may be referred to it by one of the pain clinic clinicians as part of a wider care plan.

Chronic Pain Physiotherapy focuses on helping people manage long-lasting pain and regain function, rather than only treating an injury or tissue damage. These physiotherapists understand that persistent pain involves the nervous system, movement patterns, emotions, and lifestyle factors.

What do they do?
They will assess your pain and will use a variety of techniques to help you build up confidence with your body and desensitise the nervous system. These techniques may include pain education, graded movement, activity pacing, goal-based rehabilitation and occasionally hands on techniques.

Pain Psychology focuses on how the brain, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours influence the experience of pain - especially chronic pain. It combines ideas from psychology, neuroscience, and medicine to help people understand and manage pain more effectively. 

What do they do?

Psychologists will use evidence-based techniques such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness, and Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT).
They work closely with the other members of the pain service as part of a multidisciplinary team management approach.

What don’t they do?

• Chronic pain Psychologists cannot offer crisis management, although they will signpost you to other forms of support.
• They will not prescribe medications.
• They will not offer treatment for mental health conditions and are not able to offer high intensity, open ended appointments.

TENS (short for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) is a non-invasive therapy used to help manage chronic pain by sending small electrical signals through the skin to nerves near the painful area. These signals can interfere with or “close the gate” in the spinal cord, reducing the amount of pain information reaching the brain. It can also help to relax muscles. You will feel a tingling or buzzing sensation, but it should not be painful.

TENS may not be suitable if you have a pacemaker or certain heart conditions and so you should discuss with your clinician if you are not sure.

Acupuncture is a complementary therapy that uses very fine needles inserted into specific points on the body to influence how the nervous system processes pain. When needles are inserted and gently manipulated, they stimulate sensory nerves in the skin and muscles and can help release natural chemicals that help pain and relax tight muscles.

If you have not tried acupuncture previously we may be able to offer up to 6 sessions to trial this, often however, the effect is short lasting and so your clinician may also show you how to use something called an acupen which is a way of stimulating these points electrically.

Medication is one of the strategies that may help with managing pain, however it is unlikely that medication alone will treat or cure your pain. Some medication may reduce the intensity or frequency of pain but will not completely abolish it. This means it needs to be used as part of a wider pain management plan.

We offer appointments where we will help to optimise your medications. Our recommendations are always based on clinical evidence and up to date research based on scientific clinical trials. Often using medications requires a careful weighing up of the benefits, side effects and long-term consequences of its use. There are often limits to the dosages of medications we can use, and over recent years a number of medicines have been shown to be harmful when used for a prolonged time, and are no longer recommended.

It is important to be aware that prescribing will sit with you GP and so we will share our recommendations with them for them to implement.

There are different types of injections used to treat chronic pain. You might hear people talk about nerve blocks, trigger point injections, facet joint injections or Epidurals. They work by reducing inflammation, numbing nerves, or interrupting pain signals. 

If these treatments are suitable for you, you will be referred to the Isle of Wight NHS Trust to have these (usually with the same Doctor who has discussed them with you). They are typically carried out in the day surgery unit and you will be able to go home on the same day.