The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. - Frederick Buechner
For many years my work split fairly evenly between helping people with psychological difficulties and helping people with pain problems. Quite a few people were troubled with both. In the last several years I have done much less work with pain, although I still see some people for overall pain management. This has been partly because I was trying to keep up-to-date with too many fields, so stepping back from pain work made sense. It has also been partly because the flourishing of research into happiness & wellbeing has fascinated me and taken up time. Here are a collection of pain-associated assessment and information sheets that I accumulated over the years. They are obviously relevant for work with pain, and some (e.g. one year symptom diary) can be adapted for work with stress & psychological difficulties.
IBS severity score & background - this is a scale that was used by Professor Whorwell and his research team in Manchester.
One year symptom diary & background - this one-year-to-a-sheet symptom diary can be used to track a variety of pain and other problems e.g. period symptoms, migraines, intermittent psychological difficulties, etc. See too the 'background' suggestions for use sheet.
Four day pain diary - Jensen's work suggests that 12 pain ratings - 3 daily for 4 days - is often a good way of balancing getting an adequate number or ratings with not burdening chronic pain sufferers (and clinicians) with unnecessary data collection. This has probably been the pain diary I have used most frequently.
One day pain diary - I occasionally have used this more fine-grained one day diary to look at hour to hour variations in pain.
One week pain diary - sometimes useful, for example if there seems a difference between weekend and weekday ratings.
Two week pain diary - I include this for completeness, but I probably used this two week diary least frequently over the years.
Pain diagrams, head, front & back - getting pain sufferers to draw/colour in where they feel pain or other unpleasant sensations e.g numbness, burning, etc, can be hugely useful in understanding and helping their difficulties.
Oswestry disability questionnaire - classic low back pain assessment questionnaire that's been around for many years.
Northwick Park neck questionnaire - neck pain questionnaire, somewhat of the Oswestry style.
Copenhagen neck questionnaire - good neck pain disability questionnaire.
Shoulder disability questionnaire - "as it says on the tin", a questionnaire to assess and monitor shoulder disability.
Knee pain & hip pain assessment forms and scoring - classic knee & hip pain/disability assessment questionnaires.
Low back pain, general information - I wrote this information sheet a good few years ago now, but it is still contains much that is of potential use.
Fear-avoidance & CBT approach for catastrophising - four Powerpoint slides on pain fear-avoidance loops and CBT approaches that may help.
Migraine & headache, general information - as with the low back pain information sheet (see above), I wrote this a number of years ago - but it still contains much that's of use.
Migraine & sleep hygiene - fascinating study showing major reductions in migraine duration & frequency by targeting sleep improvement. Well worth considering!
Coping with persistent pain CD - this is a recording I made quite a while ago. Again it still has some useful ideas on it. It is marketed via the charity, the British Holistic Medical Association.