The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Pain Experience in Women with Chronic Pain

Introduction: Tension headaches and migraines are the most common types of headaches that cause severe loss of daily functioning of patients. Most of these patients treated with drug therapy and it seems that drug therapy is not useful alone. This study was examined the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy approach, in pain reduction of women with chronic headaches.
Method: In this study which was a Quasi-Experimental with pre-test, post-test and control group, the sample group was selected by available sampling method from patients referred to the Baghiyat Allah pain clinic. Therfore 30 female subjects were chosen randomly and assigned to two control & experimental groups (each with 15 subjects) and were evaluated based on International Headache Society criteria and physician diagnosis. To assess the severity of pain and pain acceptance, Pain Questionnaire and Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire were used respectively in pre-test and post-test. The experimental group experienced the treatment based on commitment and acceptance therapy and the control group did not receive any treatment. Data were analyzed by analysis of Covariance.
Results: The results showed that treatment based on the acceptance and commitment therapy caused significant changes in experience of pain.
Conclusion: The results emphasize the importance of this intervention in psychosomatic diseases and provide new horizons in clinical interventions.