Effectiveness of spontaneous pain coping strategies for acute pain management: A laboratory study

Abstract

The aim of the present study has been to analyze the relationship between the use of not previously trained, diverse acute pain coping strategies andlevels of pain intensity and pain tolerance in a group of healthy participants. Previous research has analyzed the usefulness of the training of thesestrategies after several training sessions, but adequate patient training requires a great deal of time. Two hundred and forty healthy people participatedin the study. Pain coping strategies was evaluated with a version of CSQ-S. Subsequently, the participants completed a cold pressor test and tolerancetest. After that, subjectsfilled in the adaptation of the CSQ-S about the strategies which they had employed throughout the test. Correlation analysesshowed a positive relationship between pain intensity and catastrophizing, distractor behaviors, hoping and ignoring the pain. Pain tolerance correlatedwith self-instructions, ignoring the pain, reinterpreting the pain, catastrophizing and faith and praying. Regression analyses showed that catastrophizingwas found to be the strategy that most predicts the variance of pain intensity, and catastrophizing (negative) and ignoring the pain (positive) andpraying (negative) were the most predictive ones for pain tolerance. This is thefirst laboratory study that identifies the more useful pain copingstrategies which can be used by patients without previous training in an acute pain context. The results of this study could be useful in thedevelopment of protocols for nurses and other health professionals, especially for situations where potentially painful techniques are to be applied topatients.