I’m not a Neuroscientist, but I play one on TV.

If you are currently seeing me for pain or injury or considering doing so, please take some time to watch this. 20 minutes of your time is a small investment to beginning a new way of thinking about pain. Living in the seat of the opioid epidemic has given me a unique personal and professional perspective on manual therapy. My whole way of thinking about what I do has changed. Good science does that. It changes us. I’m no longer fixing ‘issues in the tissues’. My goal is provide resources and coaching that allows clients to understand what pain actually means and just how much control they can gain when they understand their nervous system. Key points in this talk from Lorimer Mosely

Pain is real!

Our brain so adept at producing pain messages, it can produce sensations even when there is an actual threat to tissues.

Pain relies on context and cues!

Pain is all about protection!

Lorimer uses and example of violin players. I’ll insert my own story here. If you’ve read my story, you understand that I had a fairly significant neck injury in my late teens.  For 20(ish) years I’ve have protected my neck. Any tiny bump to the head and I was in excruciating pain. Whether there was any damage or not. Unlearning this has completely changed the way I respond to bumping my head on a cupboard door. What used to result in a few weeks of ibuprofen, ice, massage, etc. I’ve learned to recognize that pain is coming from the nervous system and it’s desire to protect me.

Pain and tissue state are poorly related!

This so important! The statistics on back pain and the numbers as we age are demonstrative of how normal changes in the body are. If I had a dime for every conversation I’ve had with someone who has chronic back pain, has had surgery (sometimes multiple surgeries) and five years later is no less pain…

We are amazingly adaptable, bioplastic learners!

Movement is KING!

“Motion is lotion.”

Understanding pain and retraining your system works!

This is the hardest part. It requires us to the work. As a patient the desire is to go to someone who has more knowledge than we do about our condition and have them ‘fix’ us. With persistent pain the fix often requires us to do a considerable amount of relearning and retraining our brain.

Check out some of these recommendations and resources. As always, I am happy to be part of the journey.