Millions of people in the world live with sickle cell disease. Pain is one of the main reasons for hospital and emergency room visits. Pain-relieving drugs such as opioids are usually prescribed for sickle cell disease pain. Unfortunately, there are risks to these drugs such as dependency, they don’t work as well, or in some people can make the pain worse. This is why research studies need to find other ways to manage sickle cell disease pain.

Complementary and Integrative Therapies may help reduce pain and opioid use and  help people living with chronic pain.  Yet, there are few studies that have looked at the effectiveness of such therapies, and none have looked at how to implement these therapies into different health care systems and patient populations.

To address this problem, the Hybrid Effectiveness-Implementation Trial of Guided Relaxation and Acupuncture for Chronic Sickle Cell Disease Pain (GRACE) is a pragmatic trial at three large hospital health systems that will study guided relaxation and acupuncture for people with sickle cell disease. GRACE has three goals:

• To see if guided relaxation and acupuncture reduce pain.
• To look at the best ways for patients to manage their pain based on their individual characteristics.
• To understand what we would need to make guided relaxation and acupuncture as a part of healthcare.

During the planning phase of the GRACE Trial we set up the participating health systems to be able to work with guided relaxation and acupuncture. The current phase involves three study groups (guided relaxation, acupuncture, and usual care).