Pain and the use of health services among the elderly

This study examined pain management strategies and the relationship of pain to the use of health services in a sample of community-resident Canadian elderly. Analyses with the Andersen-Newman framework of need, enabling and predisposing variables revealed that pain did not make an incremental contribution to explaining service use. Traditional measures of need for services accounted for the majority of explained variance in health service use. The substantial number of participants who were found to be coping with chronic, frequent pain relied on themselves as much as formal health services for dealing with their pain. The most common coping style for these pain sufferers was a combination of analgesics and accepting mild pain as part of daily life. This combination of medical intervention and attitudinal factors appears to make the coping process very manageable.