Archive for the ‘Injured on the Job’ Category
You May Get relief from chronic pain by walking
If you are suffering from chronic pain from fibromyalgia or another medical condition, you know the frustration that comes with the attempts to control pain. While medication and therapies are a key factor in pain management, exercise can also work to relieve pain and improve quality of life. Inactivity can lead to more pain – the more you move, the less you will feel your pain.
If you are suffering from chronic pain, begin introducing regular walking workouts into your daily routine. Walking is the most basic form of aerobic exercise. There are several benefits of aerobic exercise, including: building stamina, boosting energy and reducing stiffness and pain. Specific health benefits of walking for exercise include:
- Strengthening muscles – By strengthening the muscles in the feet, legs, hips and torso, you will increase stability of the spine. Spinal stability may reduce symptoms of chronic back pain.
- Improves flexibility and range of motion – With improved range of motion, you will be less susceptible to injury due to stiffness or awkward movements.
- Strengthening joints – A low-impact workout such as walking improves strength and flexibility of the joints, as well as muscles and tendons surrounding the joints.
Research has shown that low-impact aerobic exercise is most effective for improving chronic pain symptoms. It provides a means of relaxation for both the body and mind. Exercise in short intervals has been shown to be most successful in relieving chronic pain. For example, rather than going for one 30-minute walk each day, take three short, 10-minute walks instead.
In a study of 52 sedentary patients with chronic lower back pain, Dr. Michal Katz-Leurer and colleague Ilana Shnayderman found that a simple daily walking routine can improve chronic lower back pain symptoms. Katz-Leurer, from Tel Aviv University’s Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, and Shnayderman, a graduate student at the Department of Physical Therapy and a practicing physiotherapist at Maccabi Health Care, published their findings in the journal Clinical Rehabilitation.
If you suffer from chronic pain, make a point to exercise daily. By exercising, you will help prevent muscle atrophy and decrease joint pain. Start with a simple 30-minutes of exercise each day, gradually increasing if you are able.
Consult with your physician before beginning any exercise routine.
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Herniated Disk in the Lower Back
Sometimes called a slipped or ruptured disk, a herniated disk most often occurs in your lower back. It is one of the most common causes of low back pain, as well as leg pain (sciatica).
Between 60% and 80% of people will experience low back pain at some point in their lives. A high percentage of people will have low back and leg pain caused by a herniated disk.
Although a herniated disk can sometimes be very painful, most people feel much better with just a few weeks or months of nonsurgical treatment.
Your spine is made up of 24 bones, called vertebrae, that are stacked on top of one another. These bones connect to create a canal that protects the spinal cord.
Five vertebrae make up the lower back. This area is called your lumbar spine.
Other parts of your spine include:
Spinal cord and nerves. These “electrical cables” travel through the spinal canal carrying messages between your brain and muscles.
Intervertebral disks. In between your vertebrae are flexible intervertebral disks. They act as shock absorbers when your walk or run.
Intervertebral disks are flat and round, and about a half inch thick. They are made up of two components:
- Annulus fibrosus. This is the tough, flexible outer ring of the disk.
- Nucleus pulposus. This is the soft, jelly-like center of the disk
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San Antonio Spine Surgeon, San Antonio Back Doctor, Mayo Clinic Trained Spine Surgeon, Bexar County Orthopedic Surgeon
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Spine Surgeon Dallas, Mayo Clinic Trained Spine Surgeon, Back Doctor, Spine Pain Doctor
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Pain Prevention
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Once you encounter back or neck pain, you are four times as likely to experience it again. This is why prevention is essential to your long-term recovery.
One of the best ways to avoid back pain is by exercising and stretching. Low-impact aerobics, such as walking or swimming, is an ideal way to prevent or treat back pain. Stop if the exercise becomes painful, and always remember to stretch. Stretching is easy to incorporate into your daily routine. You can even do it in front of the television.
Below are some more specific ways to prevent back or neck injuries:
The spine likes movement. Anything that puts the spine in a static position creates stress, which can cause back and neck pain. Every hour, stand, walk around, bend, arch backward gently, and twist. Doing so at regular intervals will lengthen the amount of time you can sit comfortably. Also, get an ergonomically-designed chair or an orthopedic insert to support your spine, espe
cially if your job involves long periods of sitting. Or roll up a towel, and place it behind your low back.
Prolonged standing can also strain the back. If you have to stand for long periods of time, prop one foot on a small stool or telephone book to reduce stress in the low back. Alternate with the other foot. Every half hour, bend over and touch your toes, with your knees slightly bent, or do some of the stretching exercises shown in the Seton Spine and Scoliosis website. They will help loosen your muscles, ligaments and joints.
While traveling on a plane, it helps to raise your feet on a briefcase or a bag underneath the seat in front of you. Ask for a pillow to place behind your low back to improve lumbar support. It is important to get up frequently and walk to the bathroom and back, whenever possible. Avoid hour-long periods in your seat.
Avoid sleeping on your stomach, which arches your back and puts pressure on your spine. Instead, lie on your back with a small pillow tucked under your knees. This position unloads the spine. An alternate position is to lie on your side with a pillow between your knees. If you like sleeping on your stomach, place a soft, flat pillow under your stomach to eliminate some of the arch that can stress your back.
Mattress considerations
It is important to sleep on a mattress with optimal back support, whether it is a conventional mattress or a waterbed. Older waterbeds were mushy and provided little support. However, now there are waterbeds that allow you to adjust their firmness. A good mattress should relate to your body shape. Generally, go with what feels comfortable to you.
Pain is a signal from the body to the brain that something is wrong. Either the back is too weak, too inflexible, or the wrong body mechanics were used to perform a task.
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A new hope for back pain sufferers?
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(CBS News) Back pain is one of the most common of human complaints, which is why new treatments in the works are raising so many hopes. Our Sunday Morning Cover Story is reported now by Martha Teichner:
Consider the human spine, in all its glory.
The 24 vertebrae, cushioned by gelatinous discs . . . the little facet joints that help make your back flexible . . . all the ligaments and muscles and nerves.
The spine’s elegant complexity is a miracle of engineering, or a curse when something goes wrong.
Eight out of ten Americans will experience debilitating back pain sometime in their lives.
“My pain was very excruciating,” said Lenda. “I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t bend over. I couldn’t lie down.”
“I’d say, ‘Oh Lord, can’t you help my back, it does hurt bad’ – he didn’t help me a bit,” said Leila.
And the most common culprit?
“I think most people would think it’s the inter-vertebral discs, whether it’s herniated or whether it’s just worn and arthritic and associated with pain,” said Dr. Augustus White, a professor at Harvard Medical School. He has literally written the book on lower back pain.
He says the easiest way to understand a herniated disc is to think of a jelly doughnut: When what Dr. White calls “the jelly” gets squeezed out, it presses on nerves, which can mean excruciating pain. Barring serious illness, the first line of treatment may not be what the patient (who only wants a quick fix) wants to hear.
“You need to make sure the patient doesn’t have tumor or infection,” said Dr. White, “but once you rule those out, you can be confident that you’re not going to harm the patient by saying, ‘OK, give yourself four to six weeks.'”
Believe it or not, 90 percent of disc injuries heal themselves after a few weeks, especially with physical therapy. But waiting it out can be torture, and not everybody gets better. So that’s where surgery comes in.
More than 1.2 million Americans undergo spinal surgery each year. That’s more than TRIPLE the number of coronary by-pass surgeries (415,000), and nearly FOUR TIMES the number of hip replacements (327,000).
Approximately 300,000 of those back surgeries were spinal fusions, where vertebrae are joined surgically so they can’t move. They’re often held in place, permanently, with metal screws or rods.
For many patients, surgery is the only answer – salvation. But for all too many others, it can be a nightmare.
Which brings us to Dr. Kevin Pauza, a founder of the Texas Spine and Joint Hospital in Tyler, Texas.
“I spent decades treating patients who’ve had surgery, the surgery was fusions,” Dr. pauza said. “Patients would do well for a year or two, and they’d always come to me and need more help.”
In his experience, fusion was usually the wrong answer: “The spine’s made to be a structure that bends with every movement we make, and if we immobilize a segment of the spine, the adjacent segment breaks down. That’s known as the domino effect.
“So my thought was, can we do something to that disc so that we don’t have to fuse it? Can we bring the disc back to life?”
And that’s the headline of this story. Just imagine: A procedure that repairs and re-grows discs, that doesn’t involve spinal fusion, that’s no more than minimally invasive, outpatient surgery.
The inspiration came to him when he thought about something as basic as how an ordinary cut heals.
“I realized what heals a cut is something that’s very simple: It’s two products that are in you and I, they’re in everybody.”
In our blood plasma – they’re called thrombin and fibrinogen. For the cut to heal, the two components come together, and they make a substance called fibrin.
When the two components, in concentrated form, are injected into the disc through a kind of squirt gun Pauza invented, just like epoxy glue, they combine and become fibrin.
Injected into the damaged disc, the compound acts like a sealant, filling cracks and crevices, and eventually allowing the disc to re-grow. “It allows our degenerated disc to turn into a young, healthy, normal disc,” said Dr. Pauza.
Rusty Templeton is typical of Dr. Pauza’s failed fusion patients. He had his surgery in 2008, but the pain came back and was agonizing.
“I’ve kind of damaged the disc above and below my fusion, and of course that fusion disc is also in pretty bad disrepair,” said Templeton.
Templeton is given a local anesthetic. The procedure takes about five minutes…there’s no incision..no hardware…
Typically, at first, patients feel discomfort. “Some patients even say, ‘Gosh, I wish I never had this done,'” said Dr. Pauza. “And then several weeks later, the patients just turn a corner. We tell them that they can expect that there will be one day where they have pain, and the next day, it’ll just stop.”
Dr. Pauza is hoping for Food and Drug Administration approval of the procedure by 2015, and to make it available to the public shortly thereafter. Phase III clinical trials are underway now at 20 sites around the U.S.
Dr. Pauza has successfully treated more than a thousand patients in his private practice. “We started treating the first patients approximately five or six years ago, and the success rate is approximately 86 percent,” he said.
So how did Rusty Templeton do? “My pain before was at least a ten,” he said. And two months after the procedure? “It’s still around a five, because I have underlying issues. But I can lay down now. I can, you know, walk around. I can drive where I couldn’t drive before.
“The pain level I had before the procedure was probably around anywhere from about a six to worse, eight,” he said.
Christopher Joseph is a home restorer who was in a car accident. How was his pain two months after the procedure? “Right now, it’s at zero.”
Dr. Michael DePalma is a spine specialist in Richmond, Va. The North American Spine Society has just published his paper on the latest experimental therapies involving disc restoration.
“Stem cells are something that’s being investigated to replenish cells within the disc directly, injecting growth factors, which are proteins, to try to stimulate repair in a disc have also been evaluated,” said Dr. DePalma.
He is involved in 4 different FDA trials of the new procedures and believes these so-called biologics are the future of back treatment. Based on the results so far, he thinks Dr. Pauza’s fibrin sealant offers the most promise.
If the treatment, asked Tecihner, is even 50% successful with someone, is that significant? Dr. DePalma replied, “It’d be huge.”
And then there’s the cost. Compare spinal fusion and fibrin treatment: “The treatment for a fusion – and this is the hospital fee – typically is in the $100,000 range, not including the physician’s fee,” he said. “We don’t have a set cost for [fibrin] treatment yet, but it’s approximately 95 percent less than the cost of a fusion.”
Dr. Pauza expects it to be widely available within five years.
“It’s the first time in history that we’ve been able to cause new tissue to grow within the spine. This procedure is the procedure that really the world has been waiting for,” he said.
Is it? The procedure is only for back pain sufferers with specific disc problems, but there are a lot of those . . . and Dr. Kevin Pauza is absolutely sure he’s found a better, safer, cheaper way of improving their lives.
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OVERUSE INJURIES, Workers Compensation Injury, Workers Comp Injury, Work Accident, Job Injury
Have you been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, repetitive strain injury or are you having hand or wrist pain? Here is a roadmap to treating these conditions. The first step in healing is recognizing that you have a problem. Some questions you will want to ask yourself are:
- Do your hands hurt after using the computer?
- Do you find yourself dropping more items?
- Are you constantly re-tying your shoelaces?
- Do your hands hurt when you floss your teeth?
- Are your hands or wrist hurting when you wake up, after driving, after playing videogames or using your smartphone?
Each of these problems often falls into what we call overuse injuries. Overuse injuries are slowly debilitating conditions that are the product of years of repetitive actions that eventually take a toll of your body. Studies have shown that there is no silver bullet or quick fix for these conditions.
The first step to recovery from these types of injuries is to find a competent hand surgeon, osteopathic physician or neurosurgeon to get a proper diagnosis. Once you have a diagnosis from your physician, make sure you get a prescription for hand therapy. Pain medications can have adverse effects, so take these with caution and only as prescribed by your physician. Surgery is a last resort and may only give temporary relief. From hand therapists, occupational therapists and physical therapists you will learn techniques including hot and cold transition baths, paraffin wax treatments, icing, wearing braces, wearing gloves, strengthening exercises, and ergonomics. These are far more useful than creating a dependence on medications. Keeping a log book or diary, documenting your pain and what activities you participated in that day that caused pain or lessened the pain is a helpful step to take. Hand message and relaxing activities come into play to help further your recovery process. Every therapist has a different approach, and some may work better than others for you, so do not hesitate to try a different hand therapist if the one you are using is not helping. Education is key in treating these overuse injuries. Reading up on carpal tunnel and repetitive strain type injuries can give you the tools to help combat and eliminate your pain on a daily basis. An educated patient will recover quicker. Carpal tunnel syndrome and hand pain recovery will require changes in your life such as how you drive, bike, or even carry handbags or groceries. Any use of your hands will need to be examined and optimized to your new normal. Work changes such as computer ergonomics, different keyboards, input devices, chairs, desks, and other elements that require attention are important to prevent further damage. Electronic devises such as smartphones, iPods, gaming consoles, and computers can contribute to your hand pain. Touchscreens with their swiping gestures can cause undue hardship. Ergonomics and usage reduction are a must. Physician care, hand therapy, lifestyle, and work station changes are a collaborative approach to overuse injuries. All areas must be considered to have successful recovery without reoccurrence. Experts at The BecomePainFree.com medical group can help!
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Become Pain Free, Pain, Back Pain, Spine Pain, Spine Surgery, Chronic Pain 