Empowered Pain Relief: Accessible solutions for psychologists and their patients

Please note that all registrations have to be paid in full before the event takes place - otherwise you will miss out on receiving the Zoom link. This event will be recorded for all those who are registered on the day. Recording is available for three weeks.

The definition of pain includes psychological dimensions, yet pain is most often treated as a purely biomedical problem. Moreover, most psychologists lack pain training, despite treatment seeking clients and patients having greater pain prevalence. Lack of patient access to evidence-based behavioral pain treatment perpetuates pain care disparities, human suffering, and overuse of high-risk analgesic options.

This workshop will provide an overview of pain psychology, including common evidence-based treatments. As multi-session behavioral treatments are infeasible for many clinics and patients, brief, effective, low-risk and online pain treatments are needed across the continuum of care. Empowered Relief®, a 1-session intervention developed by speaker Beth Darnall, PhD, rapidly equips individuals with effective pain relief skills for chronic pain and post-surgical pain management. Dr. Darnall is principal investigator for Empowered Relief research involving more than 2,000 Americans (including NIH and PCORI-funded studies). Empowered Relief can integrate into clinical practices broadly, be accessed by patients online, and enable efficient clinical treatment study designs. Efficacy data from 4 published randomized trials will be reviewed, including results showing clinically meaningful reductions in pain and other symptoms up to 6 months later. Empowered Relief has been adopted by major healthcare organizations across the U.S. and internationally within primary care, tertiary care and perioperative pathways.

Other topics covered in this workshop include virtual reality for chronic pain, and how to support patients who wish to reduce use of prescription opioids or are undergoing prescription opioid tapering. Dr. Darnall is principal investigator for the PCORI-funded EMPOWER study, the largest randomized prescription opioid tapering study conducted to date.

PRESENTER: Prof. Beth Darnall (USA)

Beth Darnall, PhD is Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab. A psychologist-scientist, she leads NIH and PCORI-funded national studies that on scalable behavioral analgesic interventions and patient-centered opioid reduction.

Her work centers on developing, investigating and disseminating solutions that offer more equitable access to evidence-based behavioral pain care for diverse and underserved populations. She created Empowered Relief^® a 1-session group intervention that rapidly equips individuals with effective pain relief skills for acute, chronic, and post-surgical pain. Empowered Relief^® is being delivered by certified instructors in 29 countries and in 8 languages.

She has three times briefed the U.S. Congress and the FDA on patient-centered pain care and opioid stewardship. She is a scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, served on the CDC Opioid Workgroup (2021), is Chief Science Advisor for AppliedVR, and is author of four books for patients and clinicians. She has keynoted national pain society conferences in Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. In 2018 she spoke on the psychology of pain relief at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

Stanford Faculty Profile and full CV: https://profiles.stanford.edu/beth-darnall 

Twitter: @bethdarnall