Abstract
People living with chronic pain experience multiple challenges in their daily activities. Chronic pain is complex and often provokes life circumstances that create increased social isolation. Living with chronic pain during the pandemic may add additional layers of complexity to their daily lives. The researchers endeavored to explore the experiences of people living with chronic pain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews about how the pandemic influenced participants’ lives. The interviews were recorded and analyzed using an applied philosophical hermeneutics approach. The findings were feeling socially isolated, losing their sense of livinghood, and experiencing augmented stress levels which, in most cases, aggravated their chronic pain. In addition to gaining an in-depth understanding of the needs of people living with chronic pain, these findings may guide policy decisions with the intention of improving health care access and the overall experiences of people living with chronic conditions during a pandemic.
Highlights
Living with chronic pain is a multifaceted, complex, and often solitary experience (Furnes et al, 2015)
The extent of chronic pain was not the concern of this research, but rather we focused on the meaning of the lived experience of pain while managing it during the COVID-19 pandemic
While some findings are transferrable to the general population, others are more specific to people with chronic pain, such as the need for continued access to regular health care
Summary
Living with chronic pain is a multifaceted, complex, and often solitary experience (Furnes et al, 2015). Karos et al (2020) explore the negative impacts of social changes prompted by the COVID-19 crisis especially for people living with chronic pain, such as threatening an individuals’ fundamental social needs for autonomy, belonging, and justice (Karos et al, 2020). The unique circumstances in which we currently live, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially add a whole new layer of challenges for people living with chronic pain. Given this information, health care professionals are more than ever encountering persons and their families experiencing this multidimensional challenge. Philip Strong, a known sociologist who studied pandemics, explains that a major outbreak of unknown can be accompanied by plagues of fear, panic, suspicion, and stigma; and pandemics expose the potential fragility of human social structure (Strong, 1990)
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