One of the most important things I look at with people in chronic pain is their emotion regulation style. Remember the definition if pain is a “sensory and emotional experience.” The more chronic the pain or pain that came on without a physical injury or around a time of elevated stress is likely to have […]
The power of fake knee injections is real and lasting in people with knee osteoarthritis(OA). See study link below. What is this? It’s called the placebo, but it’s really the power of your mind. It is your expectations and beliefs. You can harness new expectations and beliefs right now for healing without being tricked by […]
People have this belief that running is bad for their knees. And especially for knees with osteoarthritis. Well this systematic review of more than 1200 people over the age of 50 puts this belief to bed. Here is a snippet from the authors below: “Contrary to what we expected, we found little evidence to suggest […]
2020 study that looked at the association of MRI findings and long-term disability in chronic low back pain patients over a 13 year period. The goal was to assess whether long-term disability is associated with baseline degenerative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings in patients with low back pain (LBP). Guess what? It’s not. We know […]
One of the biggest issues with chronic pain and other chronic health ailments is that the sympathethic fight or flight nervous system is commonly in overdrive. We need to learn to activate the parasympathetic rest and digest branch of the nervous system for healing. I’m including a handout here that gives some perspective on how […]
This was a systematic review for Acute low back pain. Basically nothing was shown to be better than the other. What it tells me is the body heals by itself, not by a certain treatment. We just need to realize that and carry on as normally as we can and give ourselves time to heal. […]
Stress affects us in so many ways physically. Mental and emotional stress can be invisible to us as stress itself but it’s clearly visible in the body as physical health symptoms. This is the most common way stress presents itself. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. estimates that stress accounts for […]
New study out- randomized clinical trial for chronic low back. The placebo in this study was a cold laser machine that wasn’t even turned on!!! More evidence to show chronic pain is more likely influenced by changes in the brain and nervous system vs acute pain where there are typical changes from tissue injury. We […]
One of the biggest things with chronic pain that is not looked at enough is autonomic nervous system dysregulation. This means the fight or flight stressed out sympathetic nervous system is usually in overdrive while the rest and digest relaxed parasympathetic nervous system is not active enough. In laymen’s terms, the person is under stress. […]
New paper just out looking at fear and its relationship to pain. Fear is the fuel for continued pain. Many times when we can cut out the fuel source we can cut out the pain. One of the keys is to learn to expose yourself to what you fear and to stop avoiding things because […]
