Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on April 19, 2007
Rheumatology 2007 46(6):904-906; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kem060
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
EDITORIALS |
The Common-Sense Model of self-regulation of health and illness: how can we use it to understand and respond to our patients’ needs?
1Department of Rheumatology, Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust, UK, 2School of Psychology, University of Birmingham and 3Research Institute in Healthcare Science, University of Wolverhampton
Correspondence to: E. D. Hale, Department of Rheumatology Ward A1, Russells Hall Hospital, Dudley DY1 2HQ, UK. E-mail: Liz-Hale@toucansurf.com
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
As Hill et al. point out in their powerful paper [1], there is often a difference between objective clinical and radiographic evidence of musculoskeletal disease activity or severity and the experience of pain, other symptoms and functional ability reported by the patient. For the patient, the greatest impact of the disease lies in the effect it has on their ability to continue with a ‘normal’ daily life and this will necessarily be their focus of interest. It is, however, increasingly important for us as researchers and healthcare professionals to understand how the perceptions, experience and impact of having a musculoskeletal condition might influence a patient's interpretation and response to it, so that we, in turn, can respond more appropriately.
The model used by Hill et al. in their paper [1] to investigate these issues is varyingly known as the Illness Perceptions Model, the Illness