Pain can limit your ability to enjoy life and fully engage in the community. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The South West Healthcare Pain Clinic believes that a shift in mind set – re-wiring the brain – can help people manage and live with pain so that they can get back to doing what they love.
“We take a wide variety of patients who are suffering persistent pain and give them access to a specially Physician and an allied health team consisting of Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists and Counsellors to provide them with tools and strategies to manage and even minimise their pain over a 6-week course.”
“We see patients who are suffering back pain, nerve pain like fibromyalgia, pain stemming from sports injuries – a lot of different persistent and chronic pain – and we try to look at the whole person, the whole picture to see how we can manage their pain.”
The clinic located at South West Healthcare’s Warrnambool Community Health building on Ryot Street is free with no out-of-pocket expenses. Patients who would like to attend, need to get a referral from their GP. As a part of the clinic patients can attend group sessions over a 6-week period which focus on helping them to ‘re-train’ their brain to think differently about pain.
“Keeping a strong mindset is key to our overall wellbeing. Empowering people with coping mechanisms can help build resilience and even change our perception of pain,” says O’Neill.
For Diane Delany living with persistent nerve pain had become unbearable, “I was ready to try anything, I had just reached the point where I was sick of it, and I thought I can’t live another 20 years like this”.
Diane completed the 6-week program at the pain clinic, where she focused on retraining her brain through mindfulness and learned techniques to manage and accommodate the pain in her life.
“I would definitely recommend the clinic to anyone who has an open mind and who is willing to listen to the professionals and really give it a go, she says.
“The team were really great they taught me how to modify the way I lived, not putting things up too high or too low, how to listen to my body and take breaks, and to refocus or shift my focus to another part of my body when I felt pain. I was surprised at how much it worked, it really was the best thing for me.”
The clinic also focuses on techniques to improve sleep when living with persistent pain, and monitoring stress and it’s impacts on aggravating pain.
“We encourage patients to come to the clinic with a specific goal in mind – it might be getting back to gardening, being able to go for a walk without pain or run around with grandkids – and then we work out how we can best help them achieve that goal, so that they can start to take back a part of their life that has been stolen, due to living with pain, says O’Neill.
“I’ve got grandkids that I want to annoy!” says Diane, “I didn’t want the pain to rule my life to a point where I couldn’t enjoy that. I just wanted to get through the day without pain being the main focus.”
“I used to be a foster carer and I can’t do that now because of the pain, but I’d like to be able to get back there, and that’s now a goal I have. I just need to keep doing the exercises. When I was doing them my GP said that it was the most mentally fit she had ever seen me.”
Sessions run every Tuesday from 9:30-12:00 pm and Thursdays from 1pm – 3:30 pm. Patients undergo an initial assessment before taking part in the group sessions.
According to O’Neill “The books are open and we want people to know that if you’re living with long-term pain – we have a service here that can help.”