You wake up and realize that your back is not allowing you to roll over in bed again. You thought this pain would have gone away by now. You tried to rest, you tried stretching, you tried to avoid any painful postures, you’ve taken some Ibuprofen and Tylenol.
If you are fortunate you have a primary care physician, but some don’t and then they end up going to the Emergency Room or Urgent Care. This is where things get a little “gray”. There are practitioners that listen, but many who do not listen. Our health care providers can become complacent at times, with the demands of overloaded schedules and too many patients… thus some providers get “stuck” in a treatment regimen… not willing to explore alternative options for treatment, with a lack of a holistic approach, or simply do not have the time deemed necessary to give each patient attention.
“Pain is the least understood of all the human senses” as quoted by Deane Juhan (Job’s Body author), but it does alert the nervous system that something does not feel right in your body, it *$@% hurts! There are many books on theories and evidence on how people interpretation of pain varies widely between individuals. The pain you feel is real, but our relationship to our pain is important to how we overcome and persevere. What may work for one person, may not work for another.
Science has show that there are ambiguities with pain, meaning that when our brain gets a signal from our nerve endings that there is “too much”….but this “too much” may not mean to point of tissue destruction, just more input than we are used to. Then you throw in the stress response and the emotions, and how people have significant differences in thresholds for pain… it gets complicated.
In the United States medical system we have been dealing with the Opioid (pain killer) epidemic. Too often people go to their primary care physician or the Emergency Department and walk out with oxycodone, hydrocodone, percocet…. And I have to say that if you have taken any of these medications you were listening and trusting your health care provider that this was the best treatment advice at the time. You already know by now these medications can’t be good long term on your mind or body.
If you have not used any opioids, you do know someone close to you that has had to use them at some point, either after a surgery or to deal with chronic pain. These medications do help dampen or block pain intensity interpreted in the brain, it does not address the tissue damage/injury signal is coming from.
As humans we need to move, and move as most efficiently as we can to burn the least amount of calories. Our body works as an entire unit… and as we age we get injuries (major or minor) and learn to compensate for these despite how dysfunctional our movement is… to keep moving.
There are many alternatives to pain-killers. Our medical system is dysfunctional and we have health care providers pushed to their limits with patients, and can not listen and give the time that is appropriate to understand the unique situation of each patient. And sometimes the quickest resolution is to give pain-killers and send patient home to rest. But this obviously has not worked for you, or else you wouldn’t be looking for answers to move again without pain.
This is the main reason I have decided to start ReGenerate Physiotherapy, to give each patient adequate time and to listen, and to provide a movement analysis and hands-on treatment to help patients overcome their pain without depending on pain-killers, and avoiding surgery.
Please reach out to me and call me at 678-506-0196 or email jennifer.mcgowan@regenphysio.com with any questions! I’m here as a resource to get you where you can feel better and move freely again.