Manage Discussion Entry
· Identify the type of pain your client is experiencing for which applications of applied behavioral science are appropriate (e.g., arthritis, bone or joint pain, muscle pain, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, cancer pain, post-surgery, etc.).
My client is a 20 year old white female who suffered from multiple myeloma. She was hospitalized on and off for the last 5 years and initially not expected to survive. She did survive, however, but had to use a wheelchair and crutches during those 5 years. She was treated successfully in the hospital with medications and recently underwent a couple surgeries at the Mayo clinic in Chicago, where she had a bone graft from her hip to her thigh. She is now in full recovery with no lingering illness but she is struggling to regain her physical, as well as mental strength.
· Describe any psychological factors and emotional states of your client which appear to impact her or his mental and physical health (e.g., depression, anxiety, general level of satisfaction with life).
She presents with symptoms of depression and feelings of worthlessness because she knows that she has been a burden on her family. Her mother, who has essentially been a single mother throughout this ordeal, has had to balance raising 5 girls on her own, working fulltime and trying to pay for the medical and hospital bills. Her father, an alcoholic, left home shortly after she got sick and has only said negative things to her, telling her that she should just die because she is a burden on the family. She has also struggled with the social aspect of being in a wheelchair or on crutches throughout all of her high school career.
· Indicate the client’s locus of control and health motivation. Utilize terminology outlined in your reading.
My client seems to have a strong, internal locus of control. She has a will to live that even her doctors did not predict. She fought the odds and came back from the brink of death because she believed that she could. In her mind, she was in control of her body and certainly her mind to overcome her illness and fight off the disease that overtook her.
· Identify any additional stressors your client is experiencing that may exacerbate her or his pain experience.
Additional stressors include her inability to get a job in the field that she wanted. She applied for a flight attendant position but, because of the surgery to her leg, was denied the position. She was given a desk job instead. This is a major disappointment to her.
· Based on the reading, identify at least one pain management technique you believe would best reduce the pain experience in this situation.
I believe that she will greatly benefit from mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) as a pain management technique to reduce the pain she is experiencing. She has a very positive outlook on her future and she is determined to overcome her depression and pain but she is looking for help to manage her pain, with physical and mental or emotional setbacks. MBSR is a form of training for people who experience both mental and physical distress. MBSR programs typically focus on increasing the skill of mindfulness by practices such as meditation and body scan, which is then incorporated in to everyday life to cope (Fjorback, Arendt, Ornbol, Fink, & Walach, 2011).
· Examine the application of your selected pain management technique in relation to the same situation within a different culture. Explain the role of the perception of pain and the impact of culture on perception of pain, identifying and usage trends of applied behavioral science unique to different groups.
I don’t believe that the pain management technique MBSR is widely accepted in many other cultures. I believe it would be found predominantly in first-world countries that are more open and accepting of advanced thinking and techniques for pain management. For instance, I don’t believe you would find a doctor of any kind in most third-world countries who would recommend the use of MBSR to a patient or client looking for alternative treatment for pain. In our country, we emphasize the use of many different tools to manage pain, including counseling and health psychology. In many third-world countries, people don’t have access to counseling and health psychology. They mainly just deal with the pain or perhaps get medication to help with it. Pain is part of life. People who do not have access or knowledge of such things as counseling and health psychology don’t even know there are other ways to deal with pain.
The world is seen as an unlimited complex of change and novelty, order and disorder. Out of this total flux we select certain contexts; these contexts serve as organizing gestalts or patterns that give meaning and scope to the vast array of details that, without the organizing pattern, would be meaningless or invisible (Lilienfeld, 1978, pp. 9). In other words, to understand and cope with the world, we take on different conceptual perspectives as we might put on different pairs of glasses, with each providing a different perspective. The pragmatic “truth” of a particular perspective does not lie in its correspondence with “objective reality” because that reality is continuously in flux. Rather, pragmatic truth lies in the usefulness of the perspective in helping us to solve particular problems and achieve particular goals in today’s world (Fishman and Messer, 2013, Vol. 17, No. 2, 156 –161).
References:
McCarthy, C. J., DeLisi, M., Getzfeld, A. R., McCarthy, C. J., Moss-King, D. A., Mossler, R., Privitera, G. J., Spence, C., Walker, J. D., Weinberg, R. S., & Youssef-Morgan, C. M. (2016). Links to an external site.Introduction to applied behavioral science [Electronic version].Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/
Fishman, D. B., & Messer, S. B. (2013). Pragmatic case studies as a source of unity in applied psychology. Review of General Psychology, 17(2), 156-161. doi: 10.1037/a0032927
