Funding outcome

Adolescents can experience high rates of headache, abdominal pain, back pain and musculoskeletal pain for a number of reasons. Pain can become chronic and, when this happens, it takes a serious toll on a young person's ability to concentrate and learn, take part in sports, work, carry out everyday activities, and to manage emotions. Having chronic pain increases a young person's risk of depression, anxiety, suicide, as well as alcohol and drug use. Having chronic pain significantly interferes with sleep, and sleep is important for physical and emotional health, and for learning and problem solving. Poor sleep also places youth at risk of diseases such as diabetes and obesity, and clouds their judgement which then contributes to making bad decisions, taking dangerous risks, and expressing more violent behaviour. Both chronic pain and poor sleep contribute to poorer academic performance. Improved sleep can help with pain management which, in turn, will help reduce sleep problems. Sleep problems are best managed with non-drug strategies and with techniques that increase patients' feelings of self-control and being capable. Self-management and feeling empowered are very important to adolescents and particularly to those with chronic pain, many of whom have limited opportunity to make decisions about their health-care and build self-efficacy. Hand self-Shiatus is a form of hand pressure point massage that patients do for themselves once they are in bed for the night. It was tested with adults who have chronic pain and the results were promising. Teens with chronic pain that we talked to gave us positive feedback when we showed them the technique. In this study we would like to test hand self-Shiatsu with youth who have chronic pain. We believe it could be a powerful tool for teens, fostering a sense of self-control over one's own sleep. Importantly, it is not drug-based, it is easy to learn and cost free. We will use electronic sleep monitors worn on the wrist to determine how teens slept before and after learning the hand self-Shiatsu technique.