The value of focusing : a psychological self-help strategy when living with chronic low back pain : a mixed methods study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a widespread and disabling condition affecting many thousands of people in the UK, causing distress in many areas of their lives. Most people with CLBP do not have access to specialist advice and resort \nto managing it themselves. The government drive to encourage people to manage their own long-term conditions has led to some work on the use of self-help techniques with CLBP. However little research has been done with CLBP \npopulations who are not seeking specialist advice. This study actively sought people from this population group. Focusing - a self-help technique based on the \nclient-centred psychological approach - was introduced to two people who had long-term CLBP. In addition two people who had been using Focusing in their lives for some time and have long-term CLBP (but have not applied Focusing to \nthat problem) were also recruited. Focusing was taught either face-to-face or by telephone for six weekly hour-long sessions; the experienced Focusers spent an hour each week for six weeks Focusing with their pain. Using a mixed methods approach the four participants were interviewed a \nnumber of times, namely before, immediately after and three to six months following the Focusing sessions. They also completed the WHOQOL-PainUK questionnaire, the short-form McGill Pain Questionnaire and a global QOL measure at these three times. During the Focusing sessions they completed the \nSF-MPQ and the global QOL weekly. Within the concurrent nested design the qualitative aspect formed the theoretical driver for the study; the quantitative element providing a smaller amount of data. This enabled the findings to be \nframed in a way which makes them accessible to the wide range of healthcare professionals involved in the management of CLBP; an approach described as one of 'utility'. The management of potential incongruencies in using a mixed method approach was a continuous theme throughout the study and a model - the context of stability model - was devised to enable a harmonisation of these in the study design.During the study three of the four participants reported a change in the meaning of their pain, and improvement in the perception of their pain and its impact. After using Focusing with their CLBP participants reported that the pain no longer controlled what they did, they were able to feel more 'themselves' and \nvalue themselves and Focusing had given them a supported place to talk about their pain. Focusing appears to have an impact for these people in enabling the acceptance of CLBP and an improvement in overall quality of life was found. \nThe physical, psychological and independence quality of life domains in particular showed sustained improvement. No negative side effects were noted by any of the participants. Further study is needed to demonstrate whether the use of Focusing with CLBP confers longer term benefits and is suitable for a wider range of people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".