How Well Does Curable Work?
Mental health apps have been controversial. Do they work for chronic pain?
In a controlled trial from British Columbia, 198 subjects with chronic pain (non-cancerous) for an average of 13 years were randomly given either the app Curable (at no charge) or their usual care. Curable uses a biopsychosocial model aligned with the approach advocated by the ATNS.
After a relatively brief six weeks, the improvement in pain severity had an effect size of 0.43 (where 0.2 is small and 0.5 is moderate). There were also moderate effect size improvements in pain catastrophizing, anxiety, depression and stress. The effect on the pain’s interference with daily activity was 0.27. These improvements were sustained for six additional weeks after the conclusion of Curable use.
The authors compared these results with another study that used a 12-week intervention in patients with chronic pain that included optimized analgesic therapy, CBT and self-management strategies supported by physicians and biweekly contact with research nurses (Bair MJ, 2015). The improvement in pain severity and life interference in this study was comparable to Curable.
The authors conclude that a mobile app, such as Curable, represents an affordable and scalable approach to chronic pain management.
Curable is enabling clinicians to offer six weeks of free access to their patients here.
Ref: Thomson, C. J., Pahl, H., & Giles, L. V. (2024). Randomized controlled trial investigating the effectiveness of a multimodal mobile application for the treatment of chronic pain. Canadian Journal of Pain, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/24740527.2024.2352399
Bair MJ, Ang D, Wu J, Outcalt SD, Sargent C, Kempf C, Froman A, Schmid AA, Damush TM, Yu Z, Davis LW, Kroenke K. Evaluation of Stepped Care for Chronic Pain (ESCAPE) in veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. JAMA Intern Med. 2015;175):682. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.97.
