Pain management strategies and team approach

Multimodal pain management programmes have been used for chronic pain conditions such as low back pain or headache for many years with good results. However their effectiveness for treating fibromyalgia has only recently been established and with respect to long-term outcome the evidence is still not convincing. Recent findings, about abnormalities in pain control and neuroendocrine systems, help to understand the symptomatology of fibromyalgia and give theoretical support for these treatment concepts. They might also explain why secondary phenomena like depression, anxiety, deconditioning and disability can make it harder to treat the condition at a chronic stage. The ingredients of such multimodal programmes are described and evidence for their effectiveness is presented.