Children and Adolescents with Chronic Pain and Functional Disability: Use of a Behavioral Rehabilitation Approach

Children and adolescents who present with various chronic pain experiences and associated functional disability often share common behavioral and clinical features. Caring for these patients is challenging to health care providers and expensive for the medical community. Given the complexity of interrelated medical, psychological, and environmental variables potentially involved, a biopsychosocial conceptualization of assessment and treatment is helpful. Recent research has been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of treating children and adolescents suffering from chronic pain within an interdisciplinary rehabilitation environment. An interdisciplinary inpatient behavioral rehabilitation approach is described in detail along with how it compares to related day-hospital pain programs and outpatient services.