Thérapie cognitivo-comportementale de huit cas de syndrome douloureux régional complexe rebelle (SDRC)

We report a group therapy experience with eight patients presenting a complex regional pain syndrome. All patients included in this study had invalidating chronic pain for two years on average. All were on sick leave and had been given classical treatments, including anesthetic blocks. The patients participated in eight sessions of group therapy based on cognitive and behavioral therapy techniques. The basic goals included therapeutic education, progressive recovery of activities, and management of stress. This was a collaborative approach with evaluation designed to reestablish the patients' independence. The results observed confirmed the usefulness of cognitive and behavioral group therapy: functional impotency was improved in six of the eight patients despite the absence of improvement in pain. In addition, the satisfaction rate was greater than 70%. In the future, it would be interesting to use complementary criteria for evaluating the impact of this approach and to include patients with less advanced disease. Cognitobehavioral therapy has been found to be effective in the presence of painful behavior and erroneous beliefs. This approach is currently proposed as part of an interhospital pain center network.