Penney, who helped write New Zealand’s clinical practice guidelines on acute low back pain in 1997, recently joined Fiona Laryn’s Laryn Allied Health, and now splits his time between this clinic and one in Christchurch.
Laryn says "pain specialists are exceedingly rare in NZ, so having one based in Queenstown, or even Otago, is a significant advancement for our local community’s healthcare".
Penney says people often ask for a scan to prove where their pain’s coming from, "and we go, ‘well, actually no, pain is the condition"’.
"It’s just taking a while to be recognised as its own kind of specialist area."
He says, considering more than 600million people in the world are estimated to suffer from persistent pain, chronic pain was only given its own disease classification by the World Health Organisation two years ago.
He takes what he calls a bio-psycho-social approach to pain management.
That reflects the physical aspects of pain, such as injury, trauma or inflammation, psychological factors, like depression, which can amplify the sensation of pain and prevent recovery, and how our social environment plays a role in how we perceive and cope with pain.
Pain, Penney adds, is best defined by how long we’ve experienced it, than by how severe it is.
"The terms acute, sub-acute and chronic pain define how long the pain has been present."
Each classification needs a different approach, he notes.
And, for those interested, he says low back pain contributes about 50% of all chronic pain cases.
