Your ultimate guide to clinical reasoning part 2 - Psychosocial focused reasoning with Mark Jones

When you’re treating your patients back pain, and they tell you they’re going to have to give up work, surfing, cycling or something else they love because of their back pain, what do you say? How will this affect your treatment? How can you incorporate psychosocial factors into your assessment and treatment?

We often feel like the success or failure of a treatment is largely dependent on whether we are providing the “right” treatment or rehab exercises. Our treatment has a large role in recovery, but how do our patients psychosocial factors affect their recovery and response to treatment? If your patient believes they will or won’t get better, will this affect their outcome? How does pain hypervigilance, catastrophising and your patients response to stress influence your assessment and treatment?

In this online course with Dr Mark Jones, you will explore:

• Psychosocial focused reasoning - how you can incorporate psychosocial elements into your clinical reasoning, including patient experiences, expectations and coping strategies
• Psychosocial assessment & management
• Environmental factors that affect your patients pain experience
• Types of hypotheses involved in your clinical decision making
• How to use patients activity and participation capabilities & restriction in your clinical reasoning
• How to identify patient’s perspectives on their experiences & social influences
• How your patients maladaptive thoughts, beliefs and emotions affect their treatment outcomes
• How to identify patient beliefs that are a barrier to recovery
• Common strategies used to cope with stress
• Why your patient may be catastrophising, and what you can do about it
• Why patients become hypervigilant
• How emotions influence your patients pain & recovery
• How to identify patients with low self-efficacy
• Factors affecting your patient’s threat level and pain score
• How to understand your patients psychological response to stress and guide their management

This is part 2 in a 5 part series to help you develop your clinical reasoning.

In part 1 you explored how to quickly recognise diagnostic patterns, and confirm our diagnoses and treatment decisions with “slow” analytical clinical reasoning to get the best results for our patients.

Part 3 will take you through how to screen for psychosocial factors in your patient interview, how to unpack your patient’s beliefs and feelings, and important areas & questions you need to include in your subjective assessment.

In Part 4 you will explore types of pain your patients experience, including neuropathic, nociceptive and nociplastic (maladaptive CNS sensitisation). You will discover how to use clinical patterns and tests in cervical spine neuropathic pain patients, demonstrated in a case study, plus how to identify strength, ROM, motor control and neurodynamic impairments related to your patients pain.

Part 5 covers precautions and contraindications to assessment and treatment, red flags you need to identify, when to get your patient immediate medical attention, and a case study example of red flags masquerading as shoulder pain. You will explore how to put all of the information you have gained together with clinical reasoning to develop a treatment plan.