Physical therapists should integrate illness perceptions in their assessment in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain; a qualitative analysis
Health-behavior plays an important role in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain (MSK pain). The Common Sense Model (CSM) is a framework in which factors involved in the processing of information by a patients regarding their problem, the way this information is integrated to provide a view of the illness and how this guides health behavior, are integrated.
This qualitative analysis aims to study the way physical therapists (PT) integrate illness perception during the first assessment of patients with chronic MSK pain. Therefore the audiotapes of the assessments of 19 primary care PTs on 27 patients were analyzed.
The conclusion of this study is that some domains of the CSM were frequently asked for (identity, cause and consequences) while others (timeline, treatment control, coherence, emotional representation) received less attention. The PT were more bio-medically oriented and less psychosocial. > From: Van Wilgen et al., Man Ther (2013) (Epub ahead of print). All rights reserved to Elsevier Ltd.
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