Exercising Away Chronic Pain
- Date: 2007-08-21 - Word Count: 424
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If you're one of the 35 million Americans who experience restrictions in their daily life due to chronic pain, then chances are you've lived with it for quite some time. Most people do.
When our bodies are injured, whether it's a back, knee, neck, or even wrist injury, our bodies automatically start compensating for the injury and learning ways to "cope" with the pain. We go to the doctor, get some anti-inflammatory, and believe that the medicine will just make the pain go away. Problem solved.
The trouble with this scenario is that the pain rarely just "goes away". It often gets worse, and we have to take more and more medication to make it stop. Soon, even that stops working. In the meantime our body is changing to compensate for the injury, becoming unbalanced and creating even more stress as it becomes increasingly off-kilter. It's a snowball effect, and the root of the problem is rarely addressed.
For effective treatment to take place, any doctor or physical therapist should look at a patient's whole body, and not just the injured area.
A good example of this would be an office worker complaining of tendonitis in her right wrist due to sitting at a computer all day. Seems simple enough, right? A sound treatment would be a brace at night to keep the wrist straight, icing, and anti-inflammatories. Perhaps an ergonomic chair to sit in while she's at work.
In spite of this, however, the office worker continues to have problems. It's not until she sees a corrective exercise specialist who looks at her whole body, and not just her wrist, that the real cause is addressed. The specialist discovers that because of her pelvis being higher and her right shoulder being lower (which up until now the office worker knew nothing about), it's causing her elbow to work harder than it should, which in turn prevents the elbow from supporting her wrist as it should. Without help from her elbow, her wrist exceeded its work capacity and got inflamed.
With some unique and simple exercises from the specialist the office worker can teach her body to work the way it's supposed to, but it won't happen overnight. Rather than taking medicine for years or changing careers, she can eliminate the problem over time by correcting her form through exercise.
Corrective exercise is a relatively new field, but one that is gaining ground as an effective way to address injury by looking at the underlying causes rather than the injured area itself. It's a whole body approach to treatment.
When our bodies are injured, whether it's a back, knee, neck, or even wrist injury, our bodies automatically start compensating for the injury and learning ways to "cope" with the pain. We go to the doctor, get some anti-inflammatory, and believe that the medicine will just make the pain go away. Problem solved.
The trouble with this scenario is that the pain rarely just "goes away". It often gets worse, and we have to take more and more medication to make it stop. Soon, even that stops working. In the meantime our body is changing to compensate for the injury, becoming unbalanced and creating even more stress as it becomes increasingly off-kilter. It's a snowball effect, and the root of the problem is rarely addressed.
For effective treatment to take place, any doctor or physical therapist should look at a patient's whole body, and not just the injured area.
A good example of this would be an office worker complaining of tendonitis in her right wrist due to sitting at a computer all day. Seems simple enough, right? A sound treatment would be a brace at night to keep the wrist straight, icing, and anti-inflammatories. Perhaps an ergonomic chair to sit in while she's at work.
In spite of this, however, the office worker continues to have problems. It's not until she sees a corrective exercise specialist who looks at her whole body, and not just her wrist, that the real cause is addressed. The specialist discovers that because of her pelvis being higher and her right shoulder being lower (which up until now the office worker knew nothing about), it's causing her elbow to work harder than it should, which in turn prevents the elbow from supporting her wrist as it should. Without help from her elbow, her wrist exceeded its work capacity and got inflamed.
With some unique and simple exercises from the specialist the office worker can teach her body to work the way it's supposed to, but it won't happen overnight. Rather than taking medicine for years or changing careers, she can eliminate the problem over time by correcting her form through exercise.
Corrective exercise is a relatively new field, but one that is gaining ground as an effective way to address injury by looking at the underlying causes rather than the injured area itself. It's a whole body approach to treatment.
Related Tags: pain relief, back pain relief, natural pain relief, lower back pain relief, pain free, corrective exercise, posture exercise
Anthony Carey is the author of "The Pain-Free Program" and the founder and CEO of Function First. Function First helps those with back pain, joint pain and chronic pain eliminate it using a method called corrective exercise. Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles
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