From Melinda...
For people who come to my classes and clients who have been seeing me for a while, may have heard some of the stories I have retold from Lorimer Moseley; a physiotherapist first but now an incredibly widely published and authored Professor of Neuroscience.
These same people and others may also be aware that my husband Philip passed in mid 2023 from a two-year illness with brain cancer. In this time, he wrote a book about his life and his reckonings facing the prospect of an early departure, which was published three short weeks after he passed.
How on earth are these two points linked you may ask?
Well, I am now writing my own book in reply so to speak, about Philip, his passing, the lead up to this and how it was to care and support someone in this most precious and out of this world time of their life.
But just as Philip looked back on his life to help him to come to terms with what was going on for him, I have done the same in mine.
How does a country girl meet a city boy in Philip and go on to be the most important person in his life when he needed me to and vice versa. I of course talk about becoming a physiotherapist which was critical in my ability to help Philip as he became disabled not once in the 2-year time frame but twice.
In talking about studying to be a physio in my book, Lorimer came up, as he just happened to be the best tutor at uni one could have.
I was writing about some of the things he did that were above and beyond the call of duty which enhanced our learning no end including providing coffees for us all in a tutorial the following day after a big uni pub crawl! 😉
In writing about him, I googled what his title was these days and all these presentations he has done came up on YouTube.
Lorimer is one funny fellow! He not only makes pain sciences easy to understand but also humorous and super relevant. On the topic of Chronic Pain, this is understandably very important.
I watched this lecture :Pain, the brain and our amazing protectometre and while I have heard Lorimer speak many times before, the way he pulls together complex pain sciences research and presents it, never gets old.
His work and that of others like his, underpins my treatment ethos and has done for most of my career.
If you haven’t looked at anything like this before, I recommend you have a watch of this and we at Redo are here to answer questions about it.
The key is that pain doesn’t equal damage.
Pain is a warning signal and if we don’t have this we are at increased risk of early mortality.
You may think of an ankle sprain and the excruciating pain that is associated with this and you may say, well a moment ago I had no pain and now after I sprained my ankle, I have a lot and there is this massive amount of swelling accumulating in the area that used to house my very intact ligaments that are not so intact anymore.
How is it that pain doesn’t equal damage in this scenario?
Well in this one it quite possibly does, but picture this, you have just sprained your ankle in a rugby game, you didn’t go to ground and you are hobbling around thinking you need to get off the rugby pitch but it is the grand final and the ball comes your way and remarkably you can run and catch the ball and drive it over the white try line with no pain at all as the elation of scoring a try takes over but it is not long after this that the reality of the injury sets in and the brain now says it is time to feel pain to get you off the rugby field.
Another example of this is shark bites. People who survive these often say they felt a bump when they if fact lost their limb, not the tearing ripping pain you’d think. The brain in that moment says do we need to feel pain now or go into shock and to lock down the bleeding and get the hell out of the water.
So, what happens in an acute episode of back or neck pain, like the type that comes of just from picking up a remote control or raising your arm to wash your hair or something similarly trivial?
Let’s just say in these instances, that there was a miss match between the muscles that stabilise your joints underneath and the moving muscles on the top such that there was an aberrant movement about to be performed that the brain says “No that is not how it is done”. “Continue on this path and you may really injure yourself” (the spine houses the spinal cord so the brain is protective of how you move your back), “so I’ll cause muscles to spasm and lock you up for a few days!”
There is no injury per se but the pain can be incredibly distressing and intense but this intensity can be reduced if you know what is going on.
Some people say, I’ve ruptured my disc again!
Not generally, a ruptured disc needs high load like lifting something really heavy with poor technique or poor timing with another person or sustained low level loading.
For the acute pain, if you can recognise that pain and spasm is there to protect you versus damage then you can gradually unwind the spasm and reboot the optimal muscle patterning and movement and you are on your way again.
Sometimes this involves lying in a comfortable position and relaxing your breathing and other times some targeted stretching to relax the spasm and other times it is a trip to the physio or who you normally see for hands on treatment relief to help get things moving safely again.
Pain is for protection, sometimes this protection system goes a bit out of whack and this is where chronic pain can set in.
This is when you might need some strategies to change an overworking system. Targeted retraining of your movement patterns and coming to classes both help to calm overworking pain systems down.
Have a watch and we can talk more…
