Greetings All,

As you know, poor access to comprehensive pain care remains a major problem worldwide. To help address this problem, at Stanford University, I developed a 2-hour skills-based pain treatment class that rapidly equips people to self-manage pain and symptoms. It’s called “Empowered Relief™”.

Empowered Relief: Train your brain away from painEmpowered Relief™ is unique and transformative pain treatment because it:

  1. Requires only ONE in-person, 2-hour class
  2. Is skills-based and evidence-based
  3. 100 people can be treated in a single class (you are only limited by the size of your room!)
  4. Family members and friends are welcome to attend
  5. Can be delivered free of charge or billed to insurance (your choice)
  6. Empowers individuals to steer themselves toward pain relief, and help medical treatments work better
  7. Works alongside all other medical treatments
  8. May be delivered by health care clinicians of any discipline who become certified!
  9. Addresses a primary goal of the National Pain Strategy to better integrate behavioral treatment broadly into pain care in the U.S.

Our team is just completing work on our $4M NIH grant on Empowered Relief™. Our randomized controlled clinical trial is finishing later this year and will soon have results to share with you.

2019 Updates:

  • McGILL UNIVERSITY CANADIAN PRIMARY CARE GRANT AWARDED: Investigators at McGill University received a grant to embed Empowered Relief™ into primary care clinics in Canada (PIs Regina Visca and Sara Ahmed). In collaboration with McGill, we are translating Empowered Relief™ into French and it will go live in Canada at the end of this year. Our model of ‘scalable, low-cost, accessible, brief pain interventions delivered early in the care process’ is needed and is spreading internationally.
  • NIH GRANT TO STUDY IMPACT ON OPIOID USE: Dr. Maisa Ziadni, just received an NIH K23 career development award to test Empowered Relief™ as an opioid-sparing strategy and prevention of opioid use disorder in chronic pain.
  • NATIONAL PAIN RECOMMENDATION: The U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services Interagency Task Force on Best Practices in Pain Management just issued their 2019 report on what’s needed in American pain care and they cited Empowered Relief™ as an important scalable behavioral pain treatment strategy.
  • CLEVELAND CLINIC GRANT AWARDED: Cleveland Clinic researcher Dr. Sara Davin received a grant to test Empowered Relief™ in spine surgery patients.
  • INTERNATIONAL REACH: We have certified Empowered Relief™ instructors in Canada, the U.K., and throughout the U.S. in multiple health care organizations, including the VA health care system, Intermountain Health, Kaiser Permanente, and Centura Healthcare (4 of the largest closed payer systems in the U.S.).

Please visit empoweredrelief.stanford.edu to learn more and to find out how you can become a certified Empowered Relief™ instructor, or bring this low-cost, efficient treatment into your health care organization.

Until next time,

Beth

 

Feature image by iStock.com/KatarzynaBialasiewicz