Chronic Pain
What can be done about my Chronic Pain?
When we’ve been dealing with pain for a long time, it’s difficult to feel hopeless about what can be done about it. Perhaps you’ve worked with specialists, had the injections, and seen other physios, chiros or massage therapists...to no avail.
Pain can be a tricky or complicated subject, because it’s not quite as straightforward as having something specifically torn or broken in our body. And even so, when we can see that something isn’t quite right, let’s say on an X-ray or MRI, it doesn’t always equate to being the source of our pain. For example, think about the last time you got a paper cut. It probably hurt quite a bit in the moment, but later that evening when you took the bandage off, how did it feel? You could see the cut was still present, but were you still in pain?
We know from recent literature that pain education can be a powerful tool to help us reframe our perspective on our pain experience--when was last time anyone has ever explained to you how pain works in your body?
We also now know, that Lifestyle medicine is an incredible way to help improve chronic pain symptoms. We have tools to assess risk factors associated with increased pain levels and we have the modalities to offer a gentle recalibration of the nervous system to help you feel more empowered to the life that pain previously prevented you from enjoying.
There are numerous wonderful medical advances in the last decade to improve the pain and even aging experience, but sometimes, even those aren’t enough. If this is you, consider what it would be like to really sit down with your pain, and understand what it’s asking from you.
How can Embodiment with Isha help?
Physiotherapists are uniquely trained to dive in deep with our patients to talk about pain, and offer perspectives and strategies that are in line with the well-researched stages of tissue healing.
In other words, if you hurt yourself, we can help.
But sometimes pain can come on from seemingly innocuous problems, or there are injuries from many years ago that seem to not have “healed yet” because suffering is still present. We call this, “Persistent pain” or chronic pain, and we know that there are actual physiological and neurological changes in the body to cause these persistent feelings.
As a physiotherapist trained in this type of work (through multiple levels of Pelvic Health education, as well as Medical Therapeutic Yoga and Lifestyle Medicine), the most important part of my assessment is gaining a greater understanding of your pain experience through a subjective interview and pre-appointment questionnaires. This helps us identify which avenues to take--do we need to offer slow, novel stimulus? What about a CBT approach to movement that has previously felt threatening? How can we gently coax your nervous system to a place of calm and safety?
I work within the “RAMS” protocol, which stands for Restore, Activate, Mobilize and Strengthen to guide my treatment process, which is built upon an understanding that in order to be healthy, and believe we are healthy, we must work on the three levels:
Building and maintaining a Healthy Nervous System
Building and maintaining a Healthy Mind-Body Connection
Building and maintaining a Healthy Body.
Individuals in chronic pain have disruption to one or more of these levels of health; understanding health from this model can give us more of a road map towards greater peace and true health, instilling a sense of hope that things can be better.
Chronic Pain Resources
While the research on this topic is growing vastly, we still have a ways to go as health care practitioners in sharing this knowledge. Unfortunately, doctors and other health practitioners will still lean on pharmaceuticals and surgery as first-line interventions-- and unfortunately this doesn’t always lead to pain relief.
While I would love to have you in the clinic for a deeper dive, I also want to encourage some resources you can explore to help make sense of this reframe for yourself.