1. Pain has no purpose

When you have chronic pain and it persists over months or years, it can feel as though it is ruining your life. It is difficult to see how it could be serving any useful purpose. But even when pain is chronic and nasty, it only hurts because your brain has concluded that, for one reason or another, you are in danger. This can happen completely subconsciously. So pain serves as a protective mechanism that gets activated if your brain perceives a threat to the tissues. In chronic pain this system can go array, and start sending alarm signals even when there is no perceivable threat – like a smoke alarm that goes off when you light a match. The nervous system has become sensitized. When treating chronic pain, the trick is finding out why your brain thinks there is danger.

2. The amount of pain you feel depends on the severity of the injury

Wrong again! The amount of pain you feel does not necessarily relate to the amount of tissue damage you have sustained. For example, people present impaled by various objects in emergency rooms all over the world, and often they report little or no pain. An injury like that should create a lot of signals traveling up to the brain and alarming you of danger, and there probably are. However the brain and central nervous system can modulate these signals so it is actually possible to feel no pain despite this. Or take the World War II veteran who had routine X-rays done that revealed a bullet lodged in his neck. He had had it for 60 years without knowing it was there. The reverse is also true – often minor injuries can be very painful. Paper cuts are a classic example. They are not deep, there is not much damage, but they really hurt and sting. You can’t believe a paper cut could hurt that much.

3. Pain is only a physical sensation

Not quite. With no exceptions – a 100% of the time – the brain decides what hurts and what doesn’t. Pain often starts as a message from nociceptors, the nerve endings that sense pain. But these painful stimuli are neither enough to produce the experience of pain on their own nor necessary for an experience of pain. The sensation of pain is produced by the brain, and that means there are many other cues that play into this. The pain you experience can be influenced by the environment you are in – pain in the office is very common. It is even affected by who else is around! In pain experiments, men have been shown to have higher pain thresholds when tested by females. Also, when accompanied by their spouse, a person with a very attentive spouse will have more pain then one with an uncaring spouse. Ask yourself why. The context of pain also affects your experience of it. For example, the same minor finger injury will cause more pain in a professional violinist than in a professional dancer because finger damage poses greater threat to a violinist. The event plays a greater role in the violinists livelihood and identity.

4. Pain is just an incoming message to the brain

Even though multiple inputs can produce the sensation of pain, the story doesn’t end there. The stimulus will be carried to several systems in the body that help your body respond and get you out of trouble. The message is carried to your motor system, sympathetic nervous system, endocrine system and immune system. All of these systems can help you mobilize energy stores and escape when your body is under threat. However, all these systems function better in the short term, in the same way a sprinter can perform a high level activity for a short period of time. When they are activated for a long time, as they are in chronic pain, these systems can start to cause other problems – they can’t be expected to sprint for a marathon!

5. The pain is all in your head

Well, we have to be honest – all pain is produced by the brain. However, this does not mean for a second it is not real. All pain is real. In fact, anyone who tells you it is all in your head, implying it is not real, does not understand physiology. Take chronic pain. Injured tissues usually have a reasonably well-defined healing time, but in chronic pain the pain persists beyond this. In situations where the injury has had time to heal but pain still persists, the brain has concluded that a threat remains and that you need all the protection you can get. There are many explanations for why this happens, and the key one has to do with structural and functional changes to the nervous system. There can be changes in the part of the nervous system receiving the painful stimuli as well as in the spinal cord (which can work as a magnifier to any incoming messages) and the brain. The brain can actually physically change itself in response to pain – much like learning a new skill, say dancing or reading or riding a bike, the brain can make itself more sensitive to sensory messages from the painful area of the body. This is a key bit of information for anyone battling chronic pain, as understanding this can help you remember that hurt does not always mean harm, and help you override the pain response.

Ref. Moseley L and Butler D. 2003. Explain Pain. NoiGroup Publications.

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Matthew Martin

Matthew is a highly qualified UK-trained osteopath who is passionately dedicated to getting to the bottom of your problem.

He specializes in helping his patients recover from:

• Low back pain
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• Headaches
• Digestive problems
• Respiratory problems
• Multiple Sclerosis-related problems
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Learn a fabulous twisting sequence – great for your upper back, your lungs and your shoulders.

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Many people ask us how osteopathic therapy is different from physiotherapy, chiropractic care or massage.

The answers to that question don’t neatly fit onto one line.

Let’s start with the similarities:

Osteopathic therapy, physiotherapy, chiropractic care and massage share a common philosophy: The integrity of the spine is important in ensuring good health.

In fact, this philosophy is shared by almost all traditional healing arts, including yoga, tai chi and chi gong. It is also found in many modern complementary and alternative treatment modalities, including Alexander Technique and Structural Integration, which is also known as Rolfing.

Now for the differences:

Generally people are motivated to seek a therapist because of pain or impaired movement. Let’s look at how the same problem might be treated by the different types of therapists.

Imagine you have a shoulder injury. You play some recreational golf, and each year you get a twinge in your shoulder at the beginning of the season. You’d like to play golf pain-free and you’d like the pain dealt with once and for all.

You try physiotherapy . . .

• Your treatment time will vary from 15 to 30 minutes.
• The physiotherapist assesses your shoulder using standard orthopedic tests and reaches the conclusion that there is some impingement of one of the rotator cuff muscles, which is a very common shoulder injury.
• The therapist might choose to use some ultrasound on your shoulder .
• You will get some specific exercises to increase strength to any weakened muscles of your shoulder.
• The treatment may or may not include hands-on work. If it does, it will probably just be focused on your shoulder or upper ribs.
• You are asked to come back twice a week for eight treatments.

You try chiropractic care . . .

• Your treatment time will vary from 5 to 30 minutes for your first appointment, and last for about 5 minutes in subsequent sessions.
• Like the physiotherapist, the chiropractor might assess your shoulder using some standard orthopedic tests. The tests might also include an assessment of your spine, often using xrays.
• The chiropractor will be looking at the parts of your spine where the nerves to the shoulder come out, checking for what is called a subluxation. From the chiropractic perspective, the spine can become minutely out of alignment, and the resulting subluxations inhibit nerve flow, which can cause joints to become injured.
• Treatment will probably involve manipulating your spine to free up the nerves so that they can control your shoulder better.
• You are probably asked to come back two to three times a week for three weeks. You will then slowly decrease the frequency of your treatments until you are on some sort of monthly maintenance program to check for general subluxations.

You try massage . . .

• Your treatment time is usually an hour.
• The massage therapist will probably feel what muscles are tight and will just work on those muscles.
• Generally you will lie down and the therapist will massage the tight or sore muscles to increase blood flow to the area to speed up the healing.
• You will probably be encouraged to come back whenever you feel the need

You come try osteopathic therapy at our clinic . . .

• Your first treatment lasts one hour. Subsequent treatments last 45 minutes.
• We assess your shoulder to find our which areas are damaged.
• We then assess your spine to see if the nerves to your shoulder are compromised. In this way we are similar to a chiropractor.

We also look further afield because your shoulder does not work in isolation:

• We assess the quality of movement around some of your internal organs pertinent to your shoulder, including your lungs, liver and gall bladder. Amazingly the liver and gall bladder can both cause shoulder pain via a miscommunication in the spine that has an overlap in nerve feedback from both the shoulder and these organs.
• We assess other joints that work in conjunction with your shoulder, especially your wrists, elbows, neck and hips.
• We might even choose to look at movement patterns. For example, we’d ask you to demonstrate your golf swing technique to see if any restrictions in your hips or neck are placing too much work on your shoulder.

The treatment is strictly hands-on.

• The hands of an osteopathic therapist are more sensitive and knowledgeable than any type of machine. We don’t use ultrasound or any other machine to help us understand what’s going on.
• We find we get the best results by keeping the treatment to the work of our trained hands.
• We are trained to do strong manipulations, joint movements and massage techniques.
• We also know how to use our hands in a very subtle way to gently free restrictions around organs and other deep body structures to restore health to your body as a whole.

The course of treatment with osteopathic therapy

• We might ask you back in one or two weeks.
• On average, we will want to see you about four to six more times over a two- to three-month period to make sure the problem goes away.
• That will also give us a chance to help you with any other problems we find that we think will cause you trouble in the future.

What other people say about the differences between manual therapists:

http://www.wisegeek.com/

http://www.osteopath-help.co.uk/

http://www.osteopathic.com.au/

Osteopathy can explain this phenomenon because osteopathic therapists are trained to look beyond symptoms. We look deeper and work with the root cause of the problem.

What’s the Difference Between a Symptom and a Cause?

A symptom is something that bothers you. For example, a rash is a symptom. Pain and swelling are symptoms. They let you know something is wrong but they don’t tell you much about what is wrong.

And getting rid of the symptom does not automatically get rid of the cause.

What are the Hidden Factors Behind Injury and Illness?

Hidden factors are the root causes of injury and illness that are often obscured by years of symptoms.

Here are some factors that osteopathic therapists are trained to look for:

1. Old Injuries Dating Right Back to Birth

You are shaped by everything that happens to you. You contain the history of every event you’ve experienced, no matter how long ago.

As you move through life, every incident, every injury and illness is laid down in the tissues of your body.

Imagine a slightly crooked, windblown tree that is shaped by the slope of the hill that it grows in, and by the direction of the wind and the sun. Your body is the same.

For example, did you know that in the last few months of pregnancy most babies lie in the uterus on the left hand side of their mother’s pelvis? In this position, the baby’s face is pointing toward the mother’s spine, which limits the infant’s movement.

That means that stresses and strains in the body have already begun.

Osteopathic therapists know how to read the story your body tells about the stresses and strains you’ve experienced in a lifetime. By tracking that story back to the original event, osteopathy is able to heal in a way that other therapies cannot do.

2. The Health of the Joints Around the Injured Area

One of the first things an osteopathic therapist will do is check whether the joints near your injury are flexible and doing their fare share of the work.

Injury in one area can lead to the overuse of other areas as your body tries to compensate.

When we look at ankle injuries, this kind of chain reaction is obvious. A painful ankle will cause you to limp. The limp will put strain on your other leg and your back. You may find yourself complaining: “I have a sprained ankle and now my back hurts!”

When the injury is new, it’s easy to make the connection between having a sore ankle and getting a sore back a few days later.

The connection can be easily missed if your ankle injury is old, but the connection still exists.

Over time, your ankle has stopped hurting. Maybe it is just a bit stiff compared to the other side. Your body will make up for the stiffness by getting the next few joints above your ankle to move more.

The chain reaction has begun.

Over time, your knee, hip and lower back all end up doing more work than they should. And you end up with back pain because you sprained your ankle.

Osteopathic therapists are like detectives. They solve the mystery of your pains and injuries by reading the clues your body leaves.

3. About Fluids: “The Rule of the Artery is Supreme”

Osteopathy was first formulated by an American Doctor who thought a lot about the importance of good fluid movement in the body.  He coined the phrase, ‘The rule of the artery reins supreme’.  By this he meant that when blood and lymph flow freely, the tissues (muscles, nerves, fascia etc) work as they should.  With injury or other kinds of trauma the tissues contract, twist and compress.  The fluid flow becomes obstructed.  Tiny areas of poor blood flow and poor fluid drainage result.  These areas are considered to be a significant underlying cause of poor healing and disease.

We aim to restore movement to restricted areas of the body.  With this restoration of movement areas that have been congested can be properly serviced by the circulatory system.  A great example of this is when a client comes to us with one ankle that is always a little swollen by the end of the day.  We usually discover that this person’s hip (on the same side) is restricted and that the muscles of their leg (on the same side) are tight.  Fluid in the legs has to work against gravity to get back up to the heart.  The slightest restriction at any of the major joints will impact the free flow of fluid as it travels back ‘up stream’ to be recycled by the heart.

Osteopathic treatment helps liberate congested tissues by restoring motion to body areas that have been restricted.

4. The Amount of Stress You Have in Your Life

Your body can’t tell the difference between different sources of stress. It reacts the same way whether you’re hearing bad financial news or being surprised in a dark alley.

Your heart rate goes up. You get a shot of adrenaline. Your body shunts the blood away from your digestive system into your muscles. The flight or fight response has kicked in and you are ready to run or fight.

The problem is that most of the time there is nowhere to run and no one to fight.

You have to stay in the situation that generated the stress in the first place – sitting in the meeting, preparing the kids a rushed meal, caught in a traffic jam – while your body would much prefer that you run off the adrenaline.

When these situations happen over and over, you end up with continuously raised levels of adrenaline. This has a big effect on the way your body heals.

Your ability to tune into what makes you feel well begins to erode.

• The blood flow to your digestive system decreases, which affects your ability to absorb nutrients. When your digestion is affected, you don’t have the building blocks you need to recuperate.
• Your Immune system gets dampened down because your body has decided there isn’t ‘time’ to get ill – the implications of this over a long period of time is obvious – your ability to get well from simple things like colds and coughs is reduced.
• Chronic postural changes that lead to head aches and joint pain because people hold themselves unconsciously with the expression of the stress they are experiencing e.g. an attitude of anxiety with the head held far forwards of your centre of gravity or an attitude of fear with the shoulders rounded and the chest sunken.

The effects of long-term stress can’t be fixed with a single session of osteopathic therapy. But your first appointment will guide us in helping you set realistic expectations as to the rate of your recovery.

And we can help you with different techniques that lower your body’s response to stress every day.

You’ll definitely see the difference osteopathy can make.

5. Your Balance

You probably take your balance for granted – until something goes wrong.

Technically, your awareness of your position and movement through space is called proprioception. (It comes from the Latin words meaning being receptive to your own.)

Good proprioceptive awareness helps you avoid injury and speeds recovery.

Little sensors in your joints send vital information to your brain about how your body is moving. They can get damaged from injury or just not be very efficient from lack of use. When they don’t work effectively, your reflex response time slows.

They need to be switched back on.

Osteopathic therapy does this by using specific manipulations and specialised treatment to your joints and muscles.

We follow these up by giving you exercises to increase your proprioceptive awareness.

6. Surgeries and Scars

If you’ve had surgery, you have scars. No matter how minor or serious the surgery, all scars have one thing in common: they do not move like the tissue that was there before.

Collagen is the building block of all tissue in your body. When a scar forms, the collagen is not laid down in the same orientation as in the surrounding skin, fascia or muscle.

Because of this, the body has to deal with different input from the neuromuscular receptors that register stimuli such as stretch and movement.

By itself, this may not be a problem. But if the scar is deep and goes through many layers of tissue, the way it would after abdominal surgery, there will be a lot of altered information about the body’s movement through space.

This can lead to a change in the way the body moves.

If your body copes well, this change is unlikely to be a problem.

If your ability to change the way you move has been compromised, you may start to see problems.

For example, let’s say you have an old ankle fracture that leads to a stiff ankle. Maybe alone, it isn’t a problem. Then you have appendix surgery, which alters the way your hip and lower back move. Now you have scar tissue at either end of your leg and that changes the way your leg moves.

The next thing you know, your knee is in a vulnerable position.

An important part of our questioning is to find out from you about old injuries and surgeries so that we can assess the impact the scar tissue is having on you.  We can then work on breaking down scar tissue to help you regain flexibility, nerve health, blood flow and promote regeneration of connective tissue.

7. Dental Work

Chewing is something we do without having to think about it. The teeth are extraordinarily sensitive – the slightest change in pressure on a tooth exerts an immediate response – not only in the muscles of the jaw but right the way through the body.

According to researcher Simon King, this sensitivity of the teeth to pressure is often the hidden factor behind many injuries. He claims that fillings that aren’t filed to exactly the correct height can cause postural problems throughout the body. In his book, Live Without Pain, he goes further and outlines mechanisms of how having two different types of metal, an amalgam filling and a gold crown, in the mouth can cause a voltage to pass between them, approximately 175mV. On average it takes 70mV for a muscle to fire. The body can react to this by inhibiting certain muscles of the head and neck, which in turn will cause altered movement and subsequent strains lower down in the body.

In our clinic we have had extraordinary responses by asking people with shoulder, neck and head pain about fillings and dentistry.

This is why the history of your dental surgery is important in finding out the true causes of your pain.

8. Injuries to the Top and Bottom of the Spine

Have you ever bumped your head or fallen on your tailbone?

Do you ever have lower back pain or headaches?

Did you know the two could be connected?

The connection is a membrane called the dura. The dura is a strong, fibrous lining inside the skull that surrounds your brain. It extends like a tube from the head down the spine all the way to the sacrum. It contains a lot of nerves and can cause pain if it is restricted somewhere along it’s course.

There is no stretch in the dura. When it moves at one end, it has to move at the other. If you hit your head or fall on your tailbone, you inevitably affect the dura, which connects to the rest of your spine.

When you hit your head or tailbone, the tension transmitted to the dura can alter the micro-movements of the 26 separate bones in your skull.  Or it can cause a few segments of your spine to stop moving properly.  Or it can restrict your sacrum or your coccyx.  This is why some people get terrible headaches after a serious fall to their tailbone.  For others it may feel like an area of stiffness that a spinal manipulation can’t free up.

Osteopathic treatment of the dura uses very subtle techniques to work at a deep level in the body.  Osteopathy is the origin of craniosacral therapy (known by osteopaths as cranial osteopathy).

When you first see us, we will ask you about any blows, trips or slips that you may have overlooked or disregarded as insignificant.  This information gives us clues for what to feel for with our hands.

We can feel the slight movement between the bones of your skull when we do very gentle work on your head. We will be able to tell if that healthy movement is obstructed or restricted.

If a fall or a blow has caused a dysfunction in the link between your head and your sacrum, we can use cranial osteopathic techniques to help release the dura and allow your body the best chance of recovery.

9. The Health of Your Organs

Many therapists miss the connection between the health of your organs and any injuries or pain you may be experiencing.

Many people with low back pain have low back pain because of digestive problems or menstrual problems – it’s important to know why this happens so that you can be aware and know that your low back may not be helped by massage but in fact may be helped by treatment that helps your digestive system!

Lets look at 2 examples of how your organs can impact your muscles and joints that we see over and over again that surprise people:

Your Lungs, Your Ribcage and Your Mid-Back

Let’s say your lungs are not working well. Perhaps you’ve had bouts of pneumonia or you’re a smoker. Or maybe your ribs have been injured in some way.

Your lungs and your ribcage are virtually inseparable. When the lungs move, the ribs move, and vice-versa.

Stiff or damaged ribs mean the lungs will not inflate or deflate to their potential. On the other hand, a scarred or unhealthy lung will not let the ribs move as much as they would like.

Either situation changes how well your mid-back works because the ribs attach to the spine.

So if your lungs are not working well, you may well have pain in your mid-back.

Your Kidneys and Your Knees

All your digestive organs are connected to the supporting structure of your spine with ligaments and connective tissue known as fascia.

Problems with digestion, especially diarrhea or constipation, can pull on the ligaments and fascia that attach your digestive organs to your spine.

Over time, these small strains can affect the joints, muscles and ligaments of your back and alter movement. This can then lead to a cascade of events from local irritation of the spine to pain further away from the site.

An example of this is how a past kidney infection can cause knee pain.

The muscles in your hip that allow you to move your leg are called hip flexors. The fascia surrounding your kidney is connected to a deep hip flexor called the psoas muscle.

After a kidney infection, the fascia of the kidney can become scarred. In the same way that heat shrinks a piece of plastic wrap, scarring can shrink the fascia. As a result the fascia becomes less flexible.

Since the psoas and kidney are connected by fascia, the function of the psoas is also affected when the fascia is scarred.

If the fascia is scarred, it may cause the psoas to move differently when it controls your hip. Your hip is a strong joint, so it is unlikely to become sore.

Your knee, however, is the next joint in the chain and it does not have the advantage of lots of muscle to protect it the way the hip does. It can easily become irritated and sore, especially between the patella and the femur.

If you think any of the above factors might be the reason that you are not getting better, just give us a call to discuss your situation further or book an appointment online

According to pelvic floor rehab specialist Dr Pauline Chiarelli, pelvic floor problems can effect as many as one in three women. If you came to see us for advice on rehabilitation and help with an injury you would quickly notice that we ask questions that are not just related to your present concern but also questions about your health in general. We do this for a number of reasons; primarily we does this so that we can put your current concern into context but also it allows us to see if you have any other problems that you might have thought were “just normal”.

When we ask these questions our clients frequently mention some sort of pelvic floor dysfunction with which they have just learned to live.

Is pelvic floor dysfunction more of a female than a male problem? Scientists, Ireland and Ott, say the male pelvis is denser and the boney part of the pelvis is generally smaller in diameter allowing faster coordination between all the muscles. This denseness combined with the smaller area means that the male pelvic floor is less likely to become dysfunctional. Conversely, the female pelvis is less dense and wider, as the boney structure is designed to house and deliver a baby. This means that the female pelvic floor is more susceptible to decreased strength and coordination between the pelvic floor muscles.

How is your pelvis meant to work and why do people get pelvic floor problems e.g. incontinence? In normal posture the pelvis should be anteriorly tilted allowing the bones of the pelvis to provide support to the internal organs, muscles, ligaments etc. In females the bladder is supported by the pubic bone at the front, which, in turn, creates support for the uterus. A large proportion of women with pelvic floor problems stand with a posterior pelvic tilt and decreased lumbar spinal curve. This puts more pressure on the pelvic floor by taking away the boney support from the bladder and uterus and creates pelvic floor problems. The good news is that this can be helped learning to correctly move your pelvis…. I will discuss a little later how to correct pelvic floor problems with exercises that are much more comprehensive than Kegels.

When looking at the muscular support of the pelvic floor it is useful to look at other muscles involved in its correct function: the abdominals, the spinal muscles, the hip and the respiratory diaphragm. These muscles work as a functional group. For example, as the respiratory diaphragm contracts it lowers, drawing air into the lungs, as it lowers it causes the organs that are underneath it to move downwards. This increased pressure in the abdominal cavity gently puts pressure on the pelvic floor causing a harmonious movement between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor assists in lumbopelvic stability (Markwell 2001) along with the muscles of the lower back, hips and abdominals. Anatomically there are connections as well; one of the hip muscles, the obturator internus, and part of the pelvic floor, the levator ani, are connected by a common tendon, the arcuate tendon. This means that if there is restricted movement in one or both of the hips, perhaps from arthritis, tight muscles or even ankle injuries, part of the pelvic floor will also be affected.

So it’s more than just the pelvic floor muscles then?

Due to the interconnected nature of the pelvic floor and the muscles of the low back, hips and abdominals we always look at the “pelvic core neuromuscular system” or PCNS for short. This term was originally coined by my friends and colleagues, Christina Christie and Rich Colossi, physiotherapists specializing in pelvic floor dysfunction. By taking this approach we can determine if the current pelvic floor problems are actually being maintained by other things like poor posture, faulty breathing patterns or even by some thing as far away as an old ankle injury!

Physiotherapist Gary Gray argues that in order to get the pelvic floor functioning optimally all the structures of the PCNS should be integrated subconsciously. For example, you don’t have to think about bracing your leg muscles to stop you from falling over, it just happens, and that should be the case for the pelvic floor as well. You shouldn’t have to consciously tense your pelvic floor to prevent leakage – it should just happen.

What is pelvic floor dysfunction?

Pelvic floor dysfunction can take many forms, including but not limited to, pelvic pain, pelvic-organ prolapse, anal incontinence and urinary incontinence. Urinary incontinence can be subdivided into three categories:

•Stress incontinence – involuntary loss of urine with an increase in intra-abdominal pressure e.g. a sneeze or a hop causes a small leak of urine.

•Urge incontinence – the urge to empty your bladder with only a small production of urine.

•Frequency incontinence – urinating more than eight times in twenty four hours.

So what is normal for a healthy pelvic floor? Generally you should be urinating every two to four hours during the day and zero to once during the night (although pregnancy does temporarily increase the incidence of urinary incontinence).

Are there any other problems I may have due to pelvic floor dysfunction?

When we are talking about urinary incontinence it is worth noting that the loss of control and coordination of the pelvic muscles puts strain on other structures in the body. Many people do not realize that their back pain, sacroiliac dysfunction, sciatica, knee pain and ankle sprains could all be coming from dysfunction of their PCNS, and visa-versa.

What is an effective way to correct pelvic floor problems?

Due to the pelvic floor’s highly integrated nature with the rest of the body it doesn’t make sense to continually isolate it and rely on exercises like Kegels. That would be like treating a sore knee that was caused by limping due to a sprained ankle. The ankle should be treated first, otherwise the knee pain will just keep coming back. Having said that, there are circumstances where specific pelvic floor work such as Kegel’s are useful, but if you are able to, it is more beneficial to strengthen the pelvic floor in an integrated way.

So what do we recommend to strengthen the pelvic floor?

In order to create an environment where the pelvic floor and it’s functionally related muscle groups (diaphragm, low back, hips and abdominals) are working subconsciously we need to exercise the body in all three planes of motion using both the arms and legs to ‘drive’ or move the body to create a specific load to the whole complex of functionally related muscles.

Move over Kegels!

Introducing the Pelvicore Exercise Ball… This simple device was developed by Christie and Colossi to help their patients get faster and better results from exercises they were doing. It consists of a small inflatable ball that fits between the knees and an elastic strap that goes round the thighs holding the ball in place. Strengthening the hip muscles becomes easy when wearing the pelvicore ball because if you step out to the side all the lateral hip muscles have to work against the resistance of the elastic strap and when you step back all the medial/adductor muscles work against the pressure of the ball. Depending on your level of ability exercises with the pelvicore ball can vary from simply sitting and slowly moving your legs apart and then back together to exercises that involve squats, lunges and alternate hand drivers. These are whole body exercises that involve all aspects of the PNCS right from the ankle up to the neck.

What Next?

If you thought you were resigned to doing Kegels for the rest of your life you now know there are alternatives that may work better for you.  Come and see us at our pelvic floor clinic and we will treat you and also show you how to use a pelvicore ball so that you can do exercises at home to help prevent problems with your pelvic floor from returning. The pelvicore ball provides a simple, easy to use exercise program that can be done at home to exercise the pelvic floor properly. We are the only suppliers of the pelvicore ball in western Canada. We are confident that for the one in three women who suffer from pelvic floor problems this offers a chance for them to get stronger and more flexible. What a relief to not be in fear of the familiar accidental leak that can happen all too easily when the pelvic floor is not working properly!

References

Chiarelli, P. 2002. Women’s Waterworks: Curing Incontinence. Wallsend, NSW; George Parry.

Christie, C., & Colossi, R,.2010. Paving the way for a healthy pelvic floor: Turn on the Pelvic Core Neuromuscular System with triplanar movement and functional education. Idea Fitness Journal.

Gary, G., & Tiberio, D. 2010. Seminar. Chain reaction transformation. The Gray institute.

Ireland, M.L., & Ott, S.M. 2004. Special concerns of the female athlete. Clinics in Sports Medicine, 23 (2), 281-98.

Markwell, S.J. 2001. Physical therapy management of pelvic/perineal and perianal pain syndromes. World Journal of Urology, 19 (3), 194-99.

We look forward to hearing what you think when you’re in for your next appointment. It would be great to have the time to show you around and tell you the story of how we created the space, but the chances are that we’re going to want to get right to your treatment session.

We’re therefore taking this opportunity to tell you the story of how we designed the space for you and to give you the benefit of all the research we did to find:

• Fair trade furniture
• Non-toxic building materials
• Builders and painters committed to high environmental standards
• Original Canadian art for our the walls
• Designers who gave us good ideas
• Reclaimed wood for shelving and furniture

We’ve also created a before and after slideshow for you to watch.

Building the clinic

The first step in creating a healthy environment in our new clinic was choosing building materials that are non-toxic. We went to Rivas Eco Store in Calgary and they helped us improve air quality by choosing non-toxic paints and American Clay to use on the walls. They also helped us choose a carpet free of any synthetic material. In fact the underlay for our carpet is made out of recycled tires.

We had bold ideas about the look and feel of the clinic but we didn’t completely trust ourselves – in the past we’ve had grand notions about colour that have gone horribly wrong! So we met with designer Paul Lavoie and his amazing assistant Kary Benner. Kary came up with the idea for the shelving that covers our main reception wall, a criss-cross design that reflects the interconnected nature of the human body.

Choosing furniture and keeping to a budget was an interesting challenge. We went to Ikea and decided it just didn’t feel right to go completely Ikea. We’d heard of Bali & Beyond , a store in Calgary selling vintage, fair-trade, eco-friendly furnishings made of teak, and we decided to check them out. It turned out to be a great choice. Even Nina, our one-year-old, had a fantastic time at the store! We found chairs and coffee tables and accessories all within budget and living up to our eco-friendly principles. We highly recommend them and love the way every purchase here goes back to helping families and communities in Bali.

Our contractors and our painter all worked exclusively with eco-friendly materials. One of them had access to beautiful pieces of salvaged Douglas-fir, which you’ll notice on the reception desk, on our raspberry feature wall, and in the criss-cross shelving with the built-in children’s desk that Kary designed. If you are looking for a great eco-friendly builder or painter who works to budget and within strict time limits, we recommend:

• Patrick Allard of ecowalls, who specializes in using American clay and non-toxic paints
• Matthew Layton of Layton and Son Construction, Ltd., who offers Calgarians an environmentally dedicated contracting service
• Darius Grandbois, who normally works out of Canmore and is so busy that he doesn’t even have an email address or website! If you are looking for someone in Canmore, let us know . . .

Throughout most of the clinic you’re walking on maple wood. When we moved in, the floor was painted with a thick, ageing, white-ish yellow paint. Our options were to sand the floor or cover it with some other material. We decided to sand it, and what was meant to be a three-day sanding and refinishing process turned into a two-week feat of muscle and sweat. To avoid using heavy chemicals to strip the paint, the sanding had to be done over and over and over and over. When the floor was finally completed, the next challenge was finding a non-toxic floor-finishing product that would stand up to the number of people walking through our clinic on a daily basis. We eventually found a water-based varnish and we think the floors look pretty great!

For the art on our walls, we’ve teamed up with Karen Gimbel of Bluerock Gallery in Black Diamond. Karen is providing paintings for us to exhibit in our treatment rooms, corridors and reception. They will give our clients and our team the enjoyment and inspiration that comes from authentic art. At the moment, we’ve got a show featuring Canadian artist Eleanor Lowden Pidgeon.

Our ongoing commitment is to demonstrate our respect for our clients and the land and air around us by creating a healthy and healing environment. In our new clinic, we wanted the ambience to be one of health, community and learning.

Come enjoy a cup of tea and that special ambience before and after your appointment.

Best wishes,

Ed, Lucy, Natalie, Chloe, Gregory & our fantastic reception team