Chronic pain of any kind can be debilitating and painful. So, it is important to understand the causes of your pain and what can be done to treat it. In this article, we will discuss how physiotherapy can be used to help you deal with your chronic pain. We hope that this will empower you to seek advice and support on how to deal with your pain and get you back to feeling your best! If you would like to learn more about our chiropractic and physiotherapy treatments, explore our website or contact us today!
What is Chronic Pain?
Before discussing how to sort your pain, it is important to understand what it is and why it is causing you discomfort. This can be the case for both chronic and acute pain. While one person may describe their pain as a sharp, stabbing sensation, another may describe it as an aching, throbbing sensation. This is why it is important to listen to your body and communicate with your chiropractor or physiotherapist about your specific pain.
The term chronic refers to the persistence of pain. This tends to suggest that pain has lasted beyond the normal healing time. Whilst there is no exact timeframe, pain that lasts longer than 3 months is generally accepted as "chronic". However, if you feel as though the pain is lasting longer than it should be, you should not avoid getting advice or help.
Chronic pain can develop as a result of any number of injuries or illnesses. Each person's experience with chronic pain will be unique, as will the treatment that is most effective for them. That said, chiropractic or physiotherapy treatment can often help to manage chronic pain by addressing its underlying causes.
Physiotherapy for Chronic Pain
How Can Physiotherapy Help?
The main idea behind physiotherapy treatments is to help your body heal itself. To do this, the therapist will often try to identify what anatomical or biomechanical factors affect you and then treat these problems to give you some relief from symptoms such as pain.
A physiotherapy is a form of treatment that helps people to manage their chronic pain. It can involve a combination of exercises, stretches, massages and other techniques that help to improve the mobility of the joints and muscles and reduce pain. Physiotherapists are specialists in human movement and understanding how the body is connected and affects other parts.
Physiotherapy adopts a holistic view of pain, striving to combat the root of pain, rather than just symptoms. Therefore, physiotherapy has the potential to help you deal with and combat chronic pain as it can deal with the cause of your pain, rather than just an affected area.
Additionally, physiotherapy will involve exercise designed to strengthen your body. This allows you to prevent your chronic pain from re-emerging again and causing you severe pain.
Types of Physiotherapy Treatment
Assessment & Diagnosis
The first thing any chiropractic or physiotherapy specialist will do is complete a thorough assessment of your body. We will ask you where you are feeling pain, how it started, and what makes the pain worse/better. We may also discuss any past injuries or accidents that may have affected your body.
We'll complete muscle tests to check on your posture and flexibility too. From this information, we can establish what has caused the pain, where it is stemming from and what muscles are causing it. Using this information, together with our expertise in physiotherapy treatment, we can work out a unique plan for you - one which takes into account all aspects of your lifestyle to ensure maximum recovery without losing time at work or being limited by injury!
Every treatment plan is tailored to the individual needs of the patient. This ensures that your needs are met more specifically and that you can return to normal life more quickly.
Mobilisation
We will use a variety of techniques to mobilise your joints and muscles - this involves manipulating your body into different positions to ensure the maximum level of movement possible for you. These are done carefully, to not cause you pain. But they should allow you to feel more flexible around your joints. This increased movement can help restore normal function to the muscles and joints - reducing your pain.
This often brings about a huge amount of relief from pain and tension in the muscles, which in turn reduces your recovery time.
Massage Therapy
We also offer remedial massage therapy, which can help with aches and pains in specific areas. This can be useful where there are 'trigger points' which cause pain to radiate to other regions of the body. This kind of treatment is good for reducing recovery time. It can still be incredibly beneficial when combined with other forms of physiotherapy treatment such as acupuncture and manipulation.
Acupuncture
In some cases, we may use acupuncture and/or manipulation in the treatment plan. These are very beneficial in reducing stress on muscles and the rest of your body. Acupuncture involves inserting needles into specific points on the body. The needles do not puncture through the skin but instead, rest just underneath it. They work by stimulating life energy flow around the area of injury - increasing blood flow and oxygenation in that region, which is particularly useful in reducing inflammation and swelling.
Balance and Mobilisation Exercises
Once we have completed the mobilisation exercises, you'll be provided with a set of exercises which can be used to further aid recovery at home between treatments. These are designed to stretch, support and strengthen the relevant areas of your body that need it most - these are often neglected during an injury or accident - leaving them weak which increases the risk of future problems! Balance is a key aspect of these exercises, as it enhances the body’s ability to react to sudden loss of balance. By strengthening the muscles, and reducing their reaction time, they can restabilise your body quickly, without causing severe injury.
We might advise you on changes to make in your lifestyle too - this could include carrying out simple procedures such as changing how you live with heavy objects or your sleeping pattern.
Education
Above all, we at Falcon Health value educating our patients. We believe that educating you on your injuries, treatments and exercises is vital in ensuring a quick and long-lasting recovery. As you become more in tune with your body, you can identify the causes of pain and have learned ways to deal with it. This reduces your reliance on us and limits the degree of pain you will feel.
These are a few of how we at Falcon Health can help you. We offer a wide array of chiropractic and physiotherapy treatments for chronic pain.
Let Us Help You!
We believe that physiotherapy is a great way to deal with chronic pain as it combats the root of pain directly, rather than just the symptoms. This leads to a quicker recovery and also strengthens your muscles around the body, preventing the likelihood of pain reoccurring.
If you would like to learn more or enquire about our chiropractic and physiotherapy treatments, explore our website or click here to book a consultation. Alternatively, to talk to one of our chiropractic or physiotherapy experts, call us on 01444 257555 or email info@falcon-health.com
Article: Phoenix Marketing