I’ve written a few times now about nerve pain and how it confuses treatment. The problems with nerve pain are: Identifying it Finding the root cause And this is why you can be having the best tennis/golfers elbow treatment, the best carpal tunnel treatment, the best knee and leg pain treatment with no effect. Because it’s actually a problem with the nerve supplying that area not that area itself. The…
In my first article about chronic pain I started to explain a little about why chronic pain is different and needs to be treated differently. I talked about the science behind it and how pain works. Now let’s start to put that into context of how chronic pain affects you and how it makes you feel. One of the terms we often use when talking about chronic pain is “central…
As a kid one of my favourite games was Charades. Is it a movie. . . Sounds like . . . . Now as a physiotherapist, when doing an initial assessment I play a different kind of game with my patients – Feels like . . . . And I watch the movements of my patients as closely as I listen to the words. Pain is a funny thing –…
I’ve spoken about both of these conditions before and the difficulty in getting a good resolution to both, but there is a common cause to both conditions, one which is often ignored. New research published by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons shows that “patients with carpal tunnel syndrome are more than twice as likely to have migraine headaches”. The study then poses the question: “Could Migraine indicate a higher…
Again and again and again I go on about how important a proper assessment is for a correct diagnosis. You MUST actually talk to and examine your patient! The variety of medical testing available is fantastic, MRI scans and X-rays, nerve testing, blood tests . . . the list goes on and on (and in some private hospitals on and on and on again!). And these are fantastic at giving…