One in five British Columbian’s live with Chronic Pain. Physiotherapy can provide treatment and pain management to help people manage chronic pain. Physiotherapists use a combination of techniques to help chronic pain sufferers feel relief, improve function & mobility, and return to regular activities & normal life.
For more information, contact the Physiotherapy Association of British Columbia.
When using technology on a daily basis we need to be vigilant in not only how we use technology, but for how long a period we interact with the device. Here are some injuries – mainly in the form of repetitive stress injuries that are caused by our smart phones and tablets.
Selfie Elbow – Just like tennis elbow, this is a simple overuse injury caused by extending and twisting your arm and wrist when taking a selfie.
Text Claw – Text claw is caused by over use when texting and typing. The result of text claw is pain, soreness, numbness, and the loss of strength in your wrist. This condition is left untreated, it can lead to tendonitis.
iPad Hand – This ailment involves both hands – the hand that is used to steady or hold the tablet can suffer from painful symptoms, and pins and needles, as well as, the other hand, where the extended index finger is used for repetitive and prolonged scrolling, emailing etc.
Texting Thumb – Texting Thumb is a repetitive stress injury that affects the thumb and can also lead to a decrease in grip strength and range of motion. The thumb is good at gripping, but does not have the muscles or the mechanics to support constant typing.
Text Neck – Text neck is the term used to describe the neck pain sustained from looking down at your wireless devices too frequently and too long. Text neck causes chronic pain to the shoulders, and upper and mid back area.
How To Minimize Tech Injuries:
If you suffer from any of these injuries, please contact your health care practitioner. The treatment for any type of soft tissue injury can include massage, physiotherapy, chiropractic, and acupuncture.
Written by Mandy Oaklander
Two alternative therapies get a boost of scientific legitimacy in a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Acupuncture, the ancient practice of needle insertion, and the Alexander Technique, a program that teaches people how to avoid unnecessary muscle tension throughout the day and improve posture, coordination, balance and stress, are two complementary therapies often used to help treat neck pain. Treating it is often difficult, and it’s common for people to seek out alternative therapies.
The researchers wanted to see how well two of these worked. They assigned 517 people, all of whom had neck pain for at least three months (and sometimes many years), to the standard care for neck pain, which involves prescription medications and physical therapy. Some of the patients were assigned to also receive one of two extra treatments: a dozen 50-minute acupuncture sessions or 20 private Alexander Technique lessons—which focus on teaching people how to move their body to avoid or correct muscular pain.
A year after the start of the study, people in the groups doing acupuncture and the Alexander Technique had significant reductions in neck pain—pain was assessed by questionnaire—compared to those who just got usual care. Both groups reported about 32% less pain than they had at the start of the study, which is far greater than the 9% typically associated with physical therapy and exercise. The interventions also gave people in the groups more self-efficacy, which were linked to better pain outcomes.
The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that acupuncture is effective against pain; a landmark review in 2012 involving almost 18,000 people with chronic pain concluded that acupuncture was better than standard care and sham acupuncture (which proved the effect is not due to placebo of simply sticking needles in the body.)
“You get a two-fold effect with acupuncture for pain: a natural pain-relieving effect and an anti-inflammatory effect,” says Jamie Starkey, lead acupuncturist at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, who was not involved in the new study.
Acupuncture manipulates the nervous system, she says, activating the release of pain-relieving endorphins. “With neck pain patients, a lot will get steroid injections or take a non-steroidal anti inflammatory, like ibuprofen or a prescription medication,” says Starkey. “Those medications or injections have an anti-inflammatory effect on the body, but the acupuncture needles can do that naturally.”
The influx of new research has helped legitimize alternative therapies like acupuncture, says Starkey. “That’s really brought acupuncture to the forefront of people’s minds and attention, and physicians are a lot more willing to refer their patients to an acupuncturist.”
Most of us experience aches and pains from time to time, but aches and pains are not just for the over 50 crowd!
Types of Pain
Acute pain – is an intense and short-lived pain, usually caused by an injury. When the injury heals the pain goes away.
Chronic pain – is pain that lasts much longer than acute pain and can be either mild or severe and lasts for months or even years.
How do health care practitioners classify pain?
Pain can be classified into nociceptive (somatic, visceral), or non-nociceptive (neuropathic, sympathetic & referred) pain.
Nociceptive Pain – specific pain receptors sense temperature, vibration, and chemicals released from damaged cells; this pain is typically localized and constant. Examples include fractures, burns, sprains, or inflammation.
Somatic pain – is when the nerves detect pain in the skin, joints, muscles and deep tissues. For example if you cut your skin, the pain you experience is somatic pain.
Visceral Pain – these pain receptors sense inflammation in the internal organs. Examples of visceral pain is back pain.
Non-Nociceptive Pain – is the pain that comes from the nervous system where there are no specific pain receptors.
Neuropathic pain – is the result of an injury or disease in the central nervous system. Nerves can become compressed by tumors, scar tissue, or by infection. The pain may persist for months or years. Neuropathic pain is usually chronic, and in many cases is not fully reversible.
Sympathetic pain – occurs after a fracture or a soft tissue injury where the skin around the injury become extremely sensitive and painful.
Referred pain – is when the pain is felt either next to, or at a distance from the origin of an injury. For example, when a person has a heart attack, the pain can be felt around the arms, shoulders and back.
Measuring Pain
Pain is a very individual experience and is nearly impossible to measure objectively. A common way to assess pain is to use a numerical rating scales which asks the patient to rate their pain from 0 to 10.
Pain can be a red flag that points to a disease, illness or injury, so contact your health care provider if:
Please contact our clinic if you have any questions regarding your health!
If you are living with chronic pain, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, or even shin splints, there is a non-invasive solution in Victoria that may help you reclaim your quality of life.
Diversified Health Clinic is offering a new kind of chronic pain treatment in Victoria called Electrical Twitch Obtaining Intra-Muscular Stimulation, or “eToims” for short.
The beautiful new Diversified Health clinic on Fort Street in the restored Mosaic Building is the only clinic in British Columbia that offers this new treatment.
“The eToims treatment targets so-called trigger points where nerves and muscles meet,” says Diversified Health’s Jessica Hall, a physiotherapist who specializes in eToims. “When you irritate or damage a nerve, muscle fibers close around the nerve fibers like a fist. eToims stimulates twitch contractions that stretch and relax damaged muscles at sites all over the body.”
Traditionally this treatment has involved the use of acupuncture needles (Trigger Point Dry Needling, or IMS) to relieve pain. However, eToims is a non-invasive procedure that doesn’t use any needles.
To treat many conditions, it’s common to come in for 3-4 sessions. For chronic conditions and chronic trigger points, 6-8 sessions may be necessary. Overall results will depend upon the degree and duration of nerve involvement.
“eToims is great for sports injuries or the mysterious soft-tissue injuries from auto accidents that typically stump health practitioners” says Hall. “Muscles can tighten so much that they put even more compression or vice-like grip around the nerve as it courses its way down your body, arms, or legs.”
Types of conditions considered for treatment:
Muscle & Myofascial Pain | Carpal Tunnel Syndrome | Back Pain | Sciatica | Tension Headaches | Repetitive Strain Injuries | Sports Injuries | Fibromyalgia | Tennis Elbow | Whiplash | Tendonitis | Degenerative Disc | Bulging & Herniated Disc
Please contact Diversified Health to find out more about this new treatment to manage chronic pain.
Your quality of life can be a constant struggle if you are dealing with chronic pain which can lasts for weeks, months, even years. Combining lifestyle changes with treatment will help manage your pain, and in many cases eliminate the pain all together.
Lifestyle Tips:
Deep breathing and meditation are techniques that help your body relax, which eases pain.
Listening to soothing music can lift your mood, reduce stress and make living with chronic pain more bearable.
Exercise will increase your endorphins, and these “brain chemicals” will help to improve your mood while also blocking pain signals. Exercise has another pain reducing effect — it strengthens muscles, helping prevent re-injury and further pain.
Pain makes sleep difficult, however, alcohol or prolong use of sleep aids can make sleep problems worse. Try a warm bath or shower before bed.
Find a friend, family member or support group that understands what you’re going through; you’ll feel less alone.
Keep a journal of your daily “pain score” use a pain scale from 1 to 10. This will help you track your pain and will be very useful when consulting a practitioner.
Treatment Options:
Massage is a therapeutic method that involves muscle manipulation and pressure to promote deep tissue and muscle relaxation, improved blood flow, and the release of stress and tension. Massage for chronic pain works by releasing trigger points, restoring normal movement and removing harmful toxins from the body.
Acupuncture is a therapeutic method that involves the whole body. Pain is a feeling triggered in the nervous system, and alerts us to injuries and illnesses that need attention. Acupuncture can help reduce your pain and will release body toxins, stress and tension.
eToims is aimed at alleviating pain and dysfunction caused by muscle and nerve injury. It involves the use of an electric current to produce a twitch in the muscle that is strong enough to stimulate the deep fibers of a muscle.
The electric current produced by the eToims Technique penetrates deep enough at the trigger point to produce a strong contraction in the muscle. Basically “jump starting” the muscles to release, relax, and allow blood to follow to the muscles and nerve so that they can “breathe”.
Chronic pain is a vicious cycle that creates painful trigger points, and shortened muscles that lead to more pain. Please speak with one of our health care practitioners to discuss what type of therapies will work for you.
A new study of acupuncture — the most rigorous and detailed analysis of the treatment to date — found that it can ease migraines and arthritis and other forms of chronic pain.
The findings provide strong scientific support for an age-old therapy used by an estimated three million Americans each year. Though acupuncture has been studied for decades, the body of medical research on it has been mixed and mired to some extent by small and poor-quality studies. Financed by the National Institutes of Health and carried out over about half a decade, the new research was a detailed analysis of earlier research that involved data on nearly 18,000 patients.
The researchers, who published their results in Archives of Internal Medicine, found that acupuncture outperformed sham treatments and standard care when used by people suffering from osteoarthritis, migraines and chronic back, neck and shoulder pain.
“This has been a controversial subject for a long time,” said Dr. Andrew J. Vickers, attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the lead author of the study. “But when you try to answer the question the right way, as we did, you get very clear answers.
“We think there’s firm evidence supporting acupuncture for the treatment of chronic pain.”
Acupuncture, which involves inserting needles at various places on the body to stimulate so-called acupoints, is among the most widely practiced forms of alternative medicine in the country and is offered by many hospitals. Most commonly the treatment is sought by adults looking for relief from chronic pain, though it is also used with growing frequency in children. According to government estimates, about 150,000 children in the United States underwent acupuncture in 2007.
But for all its popularity, questions about its efficacy have long been commonplace. Are those who swear by it experiencing true relief or the psychological balm of the placebo effect?
Dr. Vickers and a team of scientists from around the world — England, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere — sought an answer by pooling years of data. Rather than averaging the results or conclusions from years of previous studies, a common but less rigorous form of meta-analysis, Dr. Vickers and his colleagues first selected 29 randomized studies of acupuncture that they determined to be of high quality. Then they contacted the authors to obtain their raw data, which they scrutinized and pooled for further analysis. This helped them correct for statistical and methodological problems with the previous studies, allowing them to reach more precise and reliable conclusions about whether acupuncture actually works.
All told, the painstaking process took the team about six years. “Replicating pretty much every single number reported in dozens of papers is no quick or easy task,” Dr. Vickers said.
The meta-analysis included studies that compared acupuncture with usual care, like over-the-counter pain relievers and other standard medicines. It also included studies that used sham acupuncture treatments, in which needles were inserted only superficially, for example, or in which patients in control groups were treated with needles that covertly retracted into handles.
Ultimately, Dr. Vickers and his colleagues found that at the end of treatment, about half of the patients treated with true acupuncture reported improvements, compared with about 30 percent of patients who did not undergo it.
“There were 30 or 40 people from all over the world involved in this research, and as a whole the sense was that this was a clinically important effect size,” Dr. Vickers said. That is especially the case, he added, given that acupuncture “is relatively noninvasive and relatively safe.”
Dr. Vickers said the results of the study suggest that people undergoing the treatment are getting more than just a psychological boost. “They’re not just getting some placebo effect,” he said. “It’s not some sort of strange healing ritual.”
The NewYork Times | Health & Science By Anahad O’Connor
In her book, The Women’s Migraine Survival Guide, Christina Peterson, M.D., offers some advice on an array of migraine triggers that women (and men too!) with chronic migraines should learn about and avoid. Here are the most common:
Stress -Stress may be a trigger, says Peterson. When you’re under stress, take periodic breaks from difficult activities, alternating tough tasks that require brainpower with other jobs that are more physically oriented. For example, switch from analyzing problems to picking up office supplies or to another activity that’s a no-brainer.
Bright Lights – Bright lights and glare can cause migraines in some people. If you’re outside in bright sunlight, always wear a protective hat and sunglasses, or move to a shady area. If the sun is streaming into the room, and you’re susceptible to migraines, it’s best to put the blinds down to limit glare. You can always put on your sunglasses or slap a ball cap on your head! (Yes, even though you’re indoors.)
Odors – Some people are very sensitive to odors, particularly those from heavy perfume or some cleaning items. You may find that strong aromas can trigger a migraine within several hours. If someone at work drenches herself (or himself) in cologne, tell your colleague you’re hypersensitive to aromas. Consider saying that you’re allergic to strong perfume, which is more likely to obtain the reaction you want, less heavy-handedness with the spray bottle.
Cigarette and Cigar Smoke – The odor of cigarette smoke is also a migraine trigger for some people. Fortunately, few workplaces allow smoking, but people do smoke in other locations. If you eat out, always sit in the “non-smoking” section.
Loud Noises – Loud noises can trigger migraines in some people, and if you’re one of them, you may wish to carry earplugs with you.
Foods – Foods are a migraine trigger for some people, especially caffeine, chocolate, aged cheese, onions and garlic. Also, stay away from monosodium glutamate (MSG), a common food additive.
NOTE: Some people limit their migraines by using white noise machines at work. These devices make a “SSSSH” sound, and help block out noise chaos. Ongoing white noise will still enable you to hear your boss and other key sounds. If you avoid migraine triggers as best you can, but you still feel a migraine coming on, try icing the pain away. Also, give us a call; we will fit you in for an immediate appointment. Be sure to explain that it’s a migraine attack that’s coming on. Chiropractic adjustments may be able to stop a migraine “dead in its tracks.”
Finally, please remember, if you ever have any questions or concerns about your health, talk to us. We’re here to help, and enjoy participating in your good health!
