Moving Beyond The Means and Standard Deviations in Pain Research – Insights to Enhance Personalized Pain Care

Thinking about pain after surgery in terms of predictors for those with complex pain at a fixed postoperative time (e.g., 3 months, 1 year) limits our ability to understand the process of recovery and test interventions. While research and treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic initially focused on a dichotomous outcome (mortality), they rapidly evolved to examining acute symptoms, hospitalization, respiratory support, and long term sequelae from infection. These studies are informing treatment and guiding individual care. The three members of this panel will briefly describe how they use person-centered analytic approaches to identify high risk individuals and guide personalized approaches for pain and symptom management; early intervention in people with a slower recovery; and apply individual recovery trajectory as the primary outcome measure for interventions to speed recovery. The goal is to spur conversation with the audience on how these approaches can be practically applied to advance research, prevention, and treatment of chronic pain. It begins by replacing the phrase, “chronic pain after surgery”, a problem in few individuals, “speeding recovery from pain after surgery” in all patients.