Discover to Recover (DTR) - Creative Pain Care for Health Care Practitioners

Overview:

Are you looking for practical and effective tools to help those living with chronic pain?

When someone walks in with a complicated history, do you struggle to know where to start?

You are not alone. 

The Discover To Recover (DTR) approach encourages curiosity over fear and gives patients the tools and strategies needed to learn from, rather than run from, their discomfort. 

Help your patients LIVE life with joy, rather than just SURVIVE their pain.  

Research shows the benefits of helping people reconceptualize pain, but a person cannot simply think their way out of it.

The most effective approach is to use many ‘doorways in’ and DTR combines all of the following: 

• Pain education
• Safe and playful return to movement
• Breath
• Awareness
• Regulation
• Mindfulness

For someone living with chronic pain, their needs can change from one moment to the next. As practitioners, we need to have a wide range of tools to choose from so we can offer them what’s best at any given moment.  

Pain is changeable and everyone is capable of learning to work with their pain.  As a health care practitioner, movement teacher or bodyworker you are uniquely equipped to teach your patients / students to become their own best expert.  This helps them move from fear to embracing activities, movement and reengaging in life with curiosity and interest. 

What you learn in DTR can be immediately and effectively applied during virtual and in-person consults.

This course will combine the practical and theoretical aspects of working with pain. 

In this course you will embody the following practices and approaches:

• A patient-centered, biopsychosocial-spiritual approach that views each person as the entire, wonderfully complex human that they are, not the diagnosis they present with
• How to treat the whole person in a way that compliments, not excludes, our previously isolated biomedical / biomechanical approach
• Weaving pain care nuggets into your treatment sessions and classes
• Active listening rather than jumping ahead to formulating solutions before fully hearing the patient’s story, goals and what’s important to them
• Breath and body awareness practices
• Breath and body regulation practices
• Vagal tone exercises
• Short ‘Movement Snacks’ as the new exercise home program solution
• How to encourage creativity 
• Tips and tricks for desensitizing the nervous system
• Tips and tools for your patients’ safe return to functional activities and living life with joy
• Weaving compassion and self-compassion into your practice and teaching
• How to treat and teach using language that fosters:
• Empowerment
• Curiosity
• Self-efficacy
• Discernment

This online course is intended for:

• Health care practitioners, movement teachers and bodyworkers ready to understand the science behind movement and pain and expand their approach to pain care in clinical practice and in studio
• Practitioners of all types—including DOs, ATs, PTs, OTs, MDs, RNs, psychologists, counselors, yoga and Pilates teachers, yoga therapists, bodyworkers and fitness professionals interested in integrating creative pain care tools with their persistent pain population
• Health care practitioners, movement teachers and bodyworkers who want a better understanding of pain and how to integrate various movement and mind/body practices
• Those interested in learning more about current pain care approaches but who do not necessarily work in an environment conducive to implementing the tools effectively so are searching for other HCP’s or programs to refer to
• People living with pain, who want to learn self-care practices, how to become their own best expert  and how to communicate better with their practitioners

Upon completion of this course, participants will:

• Have learned several short, simple, effective practices they can begin teaching immediately
• Have a better sense of how, when and where to begin with someone living with chronic pain
• Have learned practices that will foster self-awareness, self-compassion and grounding for themselves to ultimately enhance therapeutic alliance with their patients / clients
• Have practical and easy-to-implement tools for addressing chronic pain issues and clarity about how and when to use them
• Have learned to treat and teach from beyond the biopsychosocial-spiritual lens 
• Have access to PDF’s, audio and video practices you can share with your patients / students

Research shows that patient outcomes:

• Are dependent on the quality of relationship with the provider(s).
• When someone lives with pain, every aspect of their life is affected.
• Discover to Recover recognizes that what each person is living is unique to them. 
• It is our job as practitioners to meet each person where they are 
• and arm ourselves with the knowledge and tools to help.

As our understanding of pain care continues to evolve, patients can only benefit from all of us coming together to co-create, share ideas and continuously push each other to do better.