Pain Relief
Our pain treatment plans nearly always involve multiple forms of treatment directed at the same complaint. The process of getting your pain under control tends to play out either over a number of weeks or a number of months. There is great variation in the duration and intensity of our treatment plans. The size of the job is dictated mostly by how long you have had the pain, how ‘out of whack’ you are at there start line, and how severe the pain has been.
We treat everything from foot pain and plantar fasciitis through to neck pain and sinus headaches with great regularity, the core principles always remain the same though. Our treatment programs are, more often than not, an exploration of what your particular body requires in order to heal. We believe it’s our healthy doses of learning, experience, integrity, determination, and flexibility that enables us to figure out the answers as often as we do.
Our treatments include but are not limited to ….
Laser Therapy
Shockwave Therapy
Neuromuscular Release
Acupuncture and Dry Needling
Custom Orthotics
Functional Exercise
Joint Mobilisation
PHF Stretching
Spinal Manipulation
Cupping
Percussion Massage
Core Isolation Training
Traction
Mobiliser Machines
Scar Tissue Stretches and Guasha
The deeper principles behind our approach are as follows…
We use, adapt and tailor combinations of therapies to get our outcomes, a highly flexible approach to pain management brings the most success.
We aim to offer not only the necessary immediate pain relief, but also the option of means of preventing future pain wherever possible.
We always try to give you the best understanding possible of where your pain is coming from, but also of its underlying cause is.
We operate a policy of complete openness, honesty, and transparency about whether we think we are able to help as things unfold with you.
Pain treatment is much like anything to do with the human body, one person’s healthy snack is another person’s food allergy. The simple fact is that there is no one treatment that works for everybody’s pain. This is why people often express differing views on what treatment is best for a given pain. It’s easy to assume that what worked well for ourselves will work for everybody, and all too tempting to draw negative conclusions about the value of the things that didn’t work for us personally.
The universally unpredictable nature of people’s response to pain relief treatments is the reason we use so many tools at our clinic. We want to be able to help as many of you as possible:
A fundamental principle that we hold dear is that ‘pain relief’ is a different topic from ‘rehabilitation’. Most pain relief treatment is like getting a filling done at the dentist… a huge relief but with little or no preventative value. Rehabilitation, on the other hand, is anything designed to work more in terms of causality and prevent reoccurrence. Acupuncture needles may relieve your back pain, but only exercises will strengthen your core and enable it to support your spine in the long term.
It is worth bearing in mind that mental and emotional factors can also play the dominant role in stubborn pain. A very important point regarding the ‘emotional’ kind of pain is that it actually never happens on strong, healthy backs and hips. The emotions ‘throw kerosene’ on our neck, back and hip issues. Both physical and ‘therapy therapy’ are needed in those cases. We don’t provide ‘therapy therapy’ as such. We are however frequently able to help people identify whether stress or trauma are playing a part in their pain. We can also coach and guide you on options that might be worth exploring if you feel up to tackling some of that stuff. The rest of you will get away with physical therapies to resolve your pain issues.
Being healthy and pain-free is so easy to take for granted.. until we find ourselves in a situation where that luxury is no longer an option for us. As a team, we have all had legitimately intense first-hand experience with this type of thing. This may be why we take such great satisfaction in being able to help.
For us, we love the topic of pain relief and all the technical details that go into it, but we know that they are really just surface details. The real ‘juice’ when we manage and talk about pain is freedom. Freedom for our patients to enjoy normal, healthy active lives without pain. Freedom to be comfortable lying, sitting, standing and moving. These are really only second to food, water and shelter when it comes to core requirements for not only surviving, but actually being able to enjoy a normal, healthy life.
Stubborn pain is, to a large extent, the body trying to tell you about subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) forms of strain happening in your tissues. We view stubborn pain as a serious and important message from your body about its wellbeing, not only in your now but also potentially in your future.
We have learned over the years that there’s great value, great physical healing potential, and often great quality of life unlocked by the ability to ‘decode’ these messages and act upon what the body wants you to correct. We see all this as pretty important right here and now. We see it as potentially being even more important as we get older.
Today’s niggly knee is too often tomorrow’s knee replacement. Today’s tendency towards rolled ankle on the soccer pitch is often tomorrow’s career-ending ankle injury. There are often serious underlying themes of weakness at play in our bodies that can affect us later if we can’t address them in a timely fashion. Knowing these facts and being able to help you work preventatively if you need to is a major part of the ‘why’ behind what we do.
It is not always easy knowing where you should go to ask for help if you have a specific complaint. Obviously, not all practitioners are interested in all complaints. We pride ourselves on being transparent about the specific pain complaints that he has a strong track record of success with. There are a significant number of pain conditions that we can help you to manage. This is because we use a wide range of tools and approaches.
We treat a significant number of people with ankle problems daily. This is perhaps not surprising if you consider that ankle sprains are by far the most common of all injuries. The specific underlying cause of your ankle pain determines what treatment will work for you.
The most common ankle pains are those that are caused by tendinosis, micro-tears, weakness, overuse, poor alignment and scar tissue. All of these issues are caused by movement issues. At our clinic, we generally find that combinations of treatment for ankle sprains and ankle pain are what works best.
Effective treatment for arch pain & heel pain usually involves a range of soft tissue therapies and rehabilitation exercises to prevent reoccurrence. The main goals of treatment for arch pain & heel pain are pain relief, increased blood flow, collagen regeneration, and scar tissue resolution. The most common technique that works for people is scraping the scar tissue with a blunt scraping tool. Other techniques that can bring relief are things like acupuncture.
There are many different tissues in the back and spine that can be a source of pain. Bones, tendons, ligaments, fascia, discs, and nerves can all generate the pain signals we associate with back pain if they aren’t in a happy and un-injured state. Deep muscle, deep fascia, and weight-bearing joints are easily the most common sources of back pain. These particular tissues are generally the first targets for treatment in most cases of back pain. When done correctly, working with the movement and blood flow of soft tissues & joints can bring meaningful improvements in back pain episodes and even in stubborn cases of back pain.
Deep muscle and deep fascia (connective tissue) in the back of the hip are the most common source of hip pain. No surprise then that these issues are the primary target of effective treatment in most instances of ‘normal’ hip pain, meaning there is no major injury of disease process in the hip (which there usually isn’t thankfully).
When done correctly, working with the hip’s soft tissues can bring rapid improvements in pain for most of the hip pain sufferers we see. Others also require stretching of the hip joints and the scar-iliac joints. The trick to helping people with hip pain is to take a flexible and open-minded approach to their pain. What works brilliantly for me may not work at all for you.
The specifics of how we treat your knee pain will be largely unique to you. The type of treatment you will receive depends partly on what part of your knee is hurting. The knee is made up of bone, joint cartilage, strong ligaments, meniscus, tendons, muscle, bursae and a very unique patella bone. Any of the above can become inflamed or damaged in a life spent stomping around on concrete and paving slabs, and that’s even before we talk about injuries.
Thankfully even the most stubborn knee pain cases are usually not driven by irreparable damage to the knee. This means that the usual mixture of pain treatments mostly for the soft tissues of the knee frequently brings a lot of relief.
There are many different ways to have success treating neck pain, and it’s just as well because we definitely don’t all respond to the same treatment styles. For example, some people find that acupuncture for neck pain is completely life-changing while others don’t get any relief from acupuncture for their neck pain at all. This inevitably means that the key to quality care of neck pain is in many cases is working with a team who are willing to take a sufficiently flexible approach to your treatment, trialing a number of different therapies to see what works best on your specific case.
Successfully treating plantar fasciitis is not always easy. This challenge is in part due to the fact that it’s difficult to give necessary rest to this part of the body (the plantar fascia), we literally stomp on our poor plantar fascia 10,000 or more times a day. This may be why it is so common to find that you need to try numerous practitioners and treatments out before you find success with treatment for plantar fasciitis pain.
We find that the most successful methods for treating plantar fasciitis pain are those that break up scar tissue—failing that it does become more about finding ingenious ways to create ‘rest’ for your plantar fascia without having to put your life on hold.
If you are looking for ‘relief’ of your shoulder pain it’s more than likely you will find that there is a combination of treatments that will work for you. We specialise in exploring combinations of therapies that work well together, to bring the quickest and most long-lasting relief to your shoulder pain. If you want full ‘resolution’ of your shoulder pain, however, you may need to go beyond just getting ‘treatment’ and graduate to rehabilitation.
‘Resolution’ of shoulder pain becomes possible when we are willing to look at and work on the underlying weaknesses, postural issues, and lifestyle choices creating the shoulder pain. Shoulders only hurt if they have good reason to hurt. Addressing those reasons is the key to lasting resolution.
RSI, tennis elbow, golfers elbow, and wrist pain in virtually every instance are all caused by microscopic degeneration in the connective tissues of the forearm and wrist. Bad pain episodes are usually triggered off by stress. The key to successful management of RSI, tennis elbow, golfers elbow, and wrist pain is stimulating blood flow and breaking up scar tissue in the connective tissues. Once the pain is under control, you then have the option of exercises to prevent re-occurrence and stress management if needed.
It is a little-known fact that a significant number of tension headaches, cluster headaches, and migraines come from deep in the tissues of the neck. In the same way that problems with the lower spine can cause leg pain and sciatica, problems with the upper spine can refer to pain in the head. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a too surprising fact that most headache sufferers also suffer from a stiff neck.
Releasing stubborn patterns of muscle tension and joint stiffness in the neck is an excellent way to work on reducing your headaches. At our clinician, we specialise in combining different kinds of therapies that work well together to reduce headaches.
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tobias@severnclinics.co.nz
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