Your ultimate guide to clinical reasoning part 4 - Pain patterns & clinical tests with Mark Jones

Patients can describe their pain as sharp, dull, burning, spreading, like a toothache, heavy, or like a crocodile is gnawing on their leg. If they don’t actually have a crocodile attached to their leg, how does their description affect your assessment and treatment? What difference does it make if their pain is local and has a predictable response to load, or is a burning pain that spreads into their arm or leg?

In this online course with Mark Jones, you will discover how to differentiate your patients pain into one of three types - nociceptive, neuropathic or nociplastic, and why and how to adjust your assessment & treatment depending on their pain.

You will explore:

• Three types of pain your patients will experience
• Key features to help you identify the type of pain
• How pain type impacts your precautions, management and prognosis
• Clinical features of peripheral neuropathic pain
• Clinical patterns of irritated low cervical nerve root (NR)
• Clinical tests and investigations used in entrapment neuropathies
• What pain patterns will patients with visceral referral (eg gall bladder or kidney symptoms) report
• How can you treat neuromusculoskeletal impairments and function effectively if you are unable to precisely identify the source of your patient’s pain or tissue pathology?
• How can you identify if posture or limited muscular ROM is relevant to your patients pain
• What is the key to successful treatment of nociceptive, neuropathic and maladaptive/nociplastic pain?

Part 1 explores 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 2 helps you identify psychosocial factors, patient perspectives and maladaptive thoughts, beliefs and emotions that affect outcomes and play a role in your clinical reasoning.

Part 3 takes 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.

Part 5 will 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.