Physical Therapy Can Help You Get Your Life Back
Chronic pain is extremely common, with over 100 million people in the United States alone living with some sort of chronic condition. So, you are not alone if you are one of those people.
While many people manage chronic pain with standard pain medications, they have so many drawbacks that you can’t fully rely on them to treat your pain. This leaves many people wondering if they will ever find a way to cure their pain.
Fortunately, there is another option available. Physical therapy has been shown to be effective in reducing, if not completely eliminating, chronic pain. You may be able to significantly reduce your discomfort with the right treatment plan!
4 ways physical therapy can aid in chronic pain relief
1. Chronic pain relief methods such as electrical stimulation and ice/heat therapies.
Physical therapists have a variety of tools at their disposal to treat your immediate pain as well.
They can use things like transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), as well as ice and heat therapies to help reduce inflammation and ease some of the pain you are feeling.
These therapies can also help improve your body’s ability to heal.
2. Educating you on safe and gentle movements.
Most people are not fully aware of how they move in their day-to-day activities. You could be bending over, lifting, walking, running, sitting, or moving in some other manner that is contributing to your chronic pain.
Learning how to improve the issues with your movements can significantly decrease the pain you experience.
Your first session with your physical therapist will include an exam where they watch the way you perform different activities – like walking – to identify any possible problems.
Once they know where things are going wrong, they can teach you how to improve so that you do not unknowingly increase your chronic pain.
3. Increasing your flexibility.
Improving your flexibility can also help reduce your pain. When you are suffering from an injury, it is common for your body to compensate in some way to avoid the pain – which can lead to unhealthy movement patterns that you may not even be aware of.
The way your body compensates may help right after the injury, but over time it will lead to wear and tear on other parts of your body. If you feel really tight or locked up in one way or another, you are probably experiencing this type of situation.
Physical therapy can gently relax your body so that you can return to moving in a healthy manner.
Your physical therapist will work with you to ease the tension so that your body can move correctly and increase the strength of the muscles surrounding the joint so that you can maintain the correct movement patterns.
4. Improving your strength.
Depending on your condition, your physical therapist may teach you some exercises designed to strengthen your muscles and soft tissues.
It may seem strange that getting stronger is recommended by medical science when you are in pain – since exercising may be painful in and of itself, especially at first. But there are good reasons to try and make you stronger.
Often, the cause of chronic pain is pressure on nerves in your joints, whether your spine, knees, hips, elbows, or some other joint.
When you make the muscles around those joints stronger, they are better at providing support – which can take some of the pressure off of your nerves.
Find relief for your chronic pain symptoms today
As stated by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke,
“While acute pain is a normal sensation triggered in the nervous system to alert you to possible injury and the need to take care of yourself, chronic pain is different. Chronic pain persists. Pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years.
There may have been an initial mishap — sprained back, serious infection, or there may be an ongoing cause of pain — arthritis, cancer, ear infection, but some people suffer chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of body damage. Many chronic pain conditions affect older adults.
Common chronic pain complaints include headache, low back pain, cancer pain, arthritis pain, neurogenic pain (pain resulting from damage to the peripheral nerves or to the central nervous system itself), psychogenic pain (pain not due to past disease or injury or any visible sign of damage inside or outside the nervous system).
A person may have two or more co-existing chronic pain conditions. Such conditions can include chronic fatigue syndrome, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease, interstitial cystitis, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, and vulvodynia. It is not known whether these disorders share a common cause.”
We want you to know that we are here to help you if you have been living with chronic pain.
Our physical therapy team can create an individualized treatment plan to help you relieve the pain you’ve been experiencing and improve your quality of life.
Please don’t hesitate to contact Physiocare Rehab & Wellness to set up an appointment!
