Chronic pain is more often associated with opioids and medical facilities than yoga studios, but Sara Hall, a clinical nurse specialist in pain management at Regions Hospital, is changing the narrative. She shares how a 2020 grant helped her team develop a yoga program that’s more accessible for Spanish-speaking patients with chronic pain. Listen to the episode or read the transcript.
Health care’s “hot potato”
Sara Holl became interested in chronic pain management 20 years ago when she noticed how little attention the topic got in health care training. She says that chronic pain was a “hot potato” issue that often came with a one-size-fits-all approach.
“Treatment was very cookie cutter,” says Holl, “when what people need is an individual approach.”
Holl says that the way pain is treated in hospitals isn’t necessarily the way to treat it in everyday life. “A common approach in the hospital setting, where we want to treat pain aggressively, is medication-focused. But a lot of people want bigger and broader options. And they really appreciate when you talk about things outside of medication.”
One of those options, says Holl, is yoga.
Moving away from opioids
The conversation began in 2017 when the neuroscience center opened.
“It was serendipitous,” says Holl. “It allowed multiple departments to collaborate under one roof. We started talking about how we can approach pain in different ways.”
In 2020, they used a Minnesota Department of Health grant to explore non-opioid options for chronic pain management. That led to the development of an in-person yoga program. Yoga has been found to help people living with chronic pain feel better, without the use of opioids. Holl and her team wanted to reach a broader and more diverse audience, so they adapted the in-person program into a free, web-based program.
In their research, Holl says they found that the Hispanic community was the largest-growing minority population in the Twin Cities and that it would be a great opportunity to bring the program to them.
“A partner upstairs in the Center for Memory and Aging connected us to a community site in the Twin Cities,” says Holl. It was the perfect place to offer their first yoga satellite site. They were already offering free programs to Hispanic seniors there, so yoga for pain fit nicely what with they already offered.
With the help of a University of Minnesota School of Nursing student, Holl says that there ended up being very few barriers to getting people access to the program.
Diverse solutions for diverse populations
Holl says that different cultures have different attitudes when it comes to chronic pain. But one commonality is that chronic pain is more prevalent among minority populations, and that these populations often have reduced access to care.
Chronic pain is a challenge, says Holl, because patients are often looking for quick fixes.
“But that doesn’t work for chronic pain,” she says. “In the 90s and 2000s, pain was treated with opioids.” Now research says that chronic pain needs to be treated with a more multidisciplinary approach.
“We now know that opioids don’t make chronic pain better, they make it worse,” says Holl. “If you’re exposed to pain over and over and over again, your nervous system changes. Opioids will stop working.” And, Holl notes, almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who died from opioids.
Yoga for chronic pain
Yoga is wonderful for chronic pain, but it can be a hard sell, at first, says Holl. “People living with chronic pain have a fear of movement and exercise because they don’t want to hurt,” she says. But movement is the best thing for chronic pain. The yoga program Holl and her team developed is focused on making it accessible for people with chronic pain.
“It’s about balancing your nervous system,” she says. People in pain live with altered nervous systems. They’re in sympathetic overdrive and limbic system arousal. Yoga can help calm and balance these issues.
“Yoga is good because of its stillness and introspection,” says Holl. It helps people ask themselves how they’re feeling inside – a question people living with chronic pain try to avoid and ignore. Yoga also helps the parasympathetic nervous system and stimulates the Vagus nerve.
Holl says she’s working on making yoga for chronic pain more widely available and spreading the word about yoga’s benefits. “We want our medical colleagues to understand that there is real, true scientific basis for using yoga for chronic pain.”
