Recovery as personal healing work – experiences of patients with persistent musculoskeletal pain conditions

Recovery as personal healing work – experiences of patients with persistent musculoskeletal pain conditions Persistent musculoskeletal conditions are frequently occurring in the population. Often these patients consult physiotherapists in primary health care. However, physiotherapists may feel falling short in helping these patients. Clinical guidelines recommend patients to do life style changes and conditioning exercises. But patients do not seem to comply well to such interventions. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on what it is like to be ill and recover from a patient perspective. The presentation is a synthesis of what is learnt over years by studying illness and recovery experiences of patient with inflammatory or medically unexplained musculoskeletal conditions. Central in patients’ illness experiences is how an unreliable, strange body disturbs daily life and makes it difficult to fulfill social roles and obligations. The patients’ recovery experiences include patients strive to refamiliarize with their body and rebuild a tolerable, but still meaningful life. Mostly, the person’s recovery is constituted by a rather bodily work of learning from movement experiences. Thus, recovery comprises processes of recreating coherence between body, daily life and social self