“I have a vision . . . . a vision of your future . . . . . it’s a pain free future . . . . . ” Yes, yes, I know, it’s an old joke that I can predict your future with gait analysis. The studies show that it can predict your outcome after hip replacement surgery and now it turns out that it can predict your injury…
In my first post about chronic pain I explained the difference between chronic pain and acute pain and how pain functions in the body. In my second post I talked about central sensitization and how this complicates treatment for patients with chronic pain – making them, quite literally, feel more pain, more easily with less stimulation. So now I want to put this in a real life context. Knee Surgery…
Most of us are familiar with sciatica, when the discs in the lower spine (specifically L3) get compressed and start to press onto the sciatic nerve. This causes pain and tingling in the leg and buttock as well as leg weakness and pain into the foot. In fact sciatica is often used as a “catch all” term to describe all kinds of nerve issues coming from the lower back and…
In my first article about chronic pain I started to explain a little about why chronic pain is different and needs to be treated differently. I talked about the science behind it and how pain works. Now let’s start to put that into context of how chronic pain affects you and how it makes you feel. One of the terms we often use when talking about chronic pain is “central…
Neck pain, so much more than a pain in the neck! When I spoke about whiplash I mentioned some of the other conditions and symptoms which whiplash victims can also suffer from. And the reason why whiplash victims often end up with a whole laundry list of symptoms apparently unconnected to their neck? Every single nerve in the body travels through the neck. And every single action in the body,…
What is Persistent Pain? The dictionary definition of chronic or persistent pain is “any pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks.” For many of my patients, by the time they come to see me, they have seen numerous therapists, tried many medications and even had surgeries, all with varying degrees of success. And those weeks have become months or years. Is Chronic Pain different? Yes. The difference lies in how…
The hip or acetabilofemoral joint includes over 70 different ligaments, tendons, muscles and bones and is (with the shoulder) the most flexible joint in the body, slightly different in men and women. Where’s the pain? Confusingly, the area that most of us refer to as our hip is actually the pelvis bone. The hip joint itself is deep into the groin. So “true” hip joint pain is usually felt as…
The Griffith University in Australia recently did some research looking at patient satisfaction during musculoskeletal treatment. One of the key factors in making patients feel the most satisfied and the least depressed was having an X-ray. Of course there are now a multitude of investigations available, and while an X-ray might make you feel better it might not give your clinician the information they need. These are some of the…
As a kid one of my favourite games was Charades. Is it a movie. . . Sounds like . . . . Now as a physiotherapist, when doing an initial assessment I play a different kind of game with my patients – Feels like . . . . And I watch the movements of my patients as closely as I listen to the words. Pain is a funny thing –…
I’ve spoken about both of these conditions before and the difficulty in getting a good resolution to both, but there is a common cause to both conditions, one which is often ignored. New research published by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons shows that “patients with carpal tunnel syndrome are more than twice as likely to have migraine headaches”. The study then poses the question: “Could Migraine indicate a higher…