Back pain – Does Your Health Professional Assess and Treat You Holistically?
Did you know that 80% of individuals will have debilitating back pain a while within their lifetime?
Are you aware that if you get a low back pain episode, you’re a lot more than 50% likely to have another episode within 12 months?
Please continue reading if you wish to learn more about how Antony Lo from Penshurst Physiotherapy Centre solves your low back pain problems…
The primary causes of Back pain are well-known – Disc bulges or herniation, joints jammed, muscles strained and nerves pinched would be the most typical reasons why people get back pain.
Why Have you Get Low Back Pain?
This is actually the simplest question that does not seem to get answered perfectly…
The reason why often seem simple enough – “I bent over wrong”, “I acquired my child”, I fell over…but people do that all the time and they do not get injured. Actually, quite often we hear our patients say “I didn’t do anything” or “I just acquired the soap off the floor” – something they have done hundreds of times before with no problems. But…
…does your doctor or health professional actually ask “Why did your disc bulge?” or “Why have you jam your joints” or “Why did parts of your muscles strain” or “Why did your nerve get pinched?”.
It is fine to be aware what happened to make you sore but it doesn’t always provide you with the reasons why it became sore in the first place.
Musculoskeletal Physical Therapists are “Problem Detectives”
We feel in treating your Back pain holistically. Many people say they are holistic but are they holistic?
To properly assess why you have Back pain, we carefully pay attention to your story. It’s in your story that we find clues as to why something happened for you…perhaps it’s the way you work or the habits you have. Our questions are carefully chosen to attract out just as much useful information that you have. Actually, we sometimes ask things that you do not think relates to your Low Back Pain – things like “what operations perhaps you have had?” or “Do you get headaches?”. We ask this stuff because your answers help us complete the image of why you are getting Low Back Pain.
Next, we check how your Low Back Pain has effects on your function – that is physio jargon for “the stuff you do in everyday life” – such things as bending over, sitting, standing etc. These are the things that will need to get better if you are planning to feel 100% again right?
Most importantly, we check on the next:
* Your Joints,
* Your Muscles and
* Your anxiety
Now every good Physical Therapist, Chiropractor and Osteopath will do this…but we don’t just stop at your lower back. We also routinely look into the following joints:
* Sacroiliac Joint (SIJ)
* Hips
* Ribs
* Thoracic Spine
Why? Because all of these areas may cause your back pain. As we need to, we will also look at your knees, ankles, feet, shoulders and neck too.
The thing is, you’ve muscles that go readily available locations and go over the low back. You might also need nerves from the mid back that go to the legs – completely to the tips of the toes.
If you’re being truly holistically looked after, each one of these areas is going to be checked – and that is what we should do!
How Do We Treat Back pain?
After we been employed by out what is really causing your problems (not just what is sore), we develop a treatment strategy.
Ideally you would need to move freely and maintain positions without pain and without causing further damage both now as well as in the near future. To achieve that, you need to activate the best muscles at the proper time using the right movement patterns. However, you can’t do this if you can’t adopt the most efficient position for your all of you joints – as well as your overall posture. Usually there are structures that are not quite right which stop you from adopting the best posture and efficient positions…
…therefore, we find what we have to release – they may be overactive muscles, tight muscles, tight joints, fibrosed muscles or joints, or even just overall “tension”. We use a variety of processes to assist you to learn to relax the best muscles. Sometimes, our remedial massage therapists need to provide that release with massage and stretching for you personally.
We then educate you on the best positions and best overall posture for you personally. These would be to do with sitting, standing, lifting children, working, etc…basically any position that you are necessary to adopt to live a normal life everyday.
Once you can adopt those positions, we teach you how to achieve the best movement patterns. This could be by considering a unique cue/thought that has got the brain to work the best muscles at the proper time. Again this is an individual process and also the solution we use is going to be unique for you.
Finally, we educate you on how to move correctly and do those tasks that used to be painful or weak but they are now stronger and not painful!! We sometimes need to break these movements into various parts – it is exactly what is often referred to as “exercises”. But we always try to relate what you’re exercising to what you must do in everyday life. Our Exercise Physiologists / Scientists can help you learn the right posture / alignment, cues and movement patterns with specialised exercises.
Really quite simple huh?
When ever you are “sick from the pain”…
Simply because pain is common does not mean it needs to be normal. There are lots of “common” treatments out there which might or might not have worked for you personally.
We feel our approach differs to the “common” approach…it is holistic, it focuses on optimum function which is economical.