Gardening needn’t be a pain in the neck … or the back!

  As well as being a keen gardener myself since childhood, I have been treating gardening injuries for over twenty years… and I have never yet told anyone to stop gardening. But you can make life a lot easier for yourself, particularly at this time of the year when the emphasis lies on tidying up and getting things ready for the winter. So here are our team’s top tips for pain free Autumn gardening:



 

First up LOOK AT WHAT YOU'RE USING

·   Buy light aluminium tools
·   A fist and arm support can be added to handles to help lifting
·   Ensure the handles of rakes and brooms are long enough for you not to have to bend at the     waist and to keep your back straight when working
·   Use a long handled dustpan and brush to avoid bending
·   Keep the cutting edge of tools SHARP – and that includes spades, hoes and bulb planters


 

Secondly, THINK before you start side-on activities such as RAKING or SWEEPING

·    Use a light aluminium rake or broom
·    Do some gentle warm up stretches
·    Work in short bursts
·    Keep hips and shoulders moving towards the work
·    Do not twist your back
·    Avoid bending at the waist by stepping forward with one foot and bending slightly at the knee, allowing your upper body to stay upright in a partial lunge 

 AND

·    Ask yourself whether you have to rake at all? 










Whereas leaf mould is a fantastic resource for any gardener, leaves also make great compost, particularly when mixed with grass clipping so why not collect leaves in the grass box of your lawn mower?

 If you haven’t got a compost heap, simply leave the grass box off your mower and allow the mower to chop up the leaves. Worms will soon pull them underground and the leaves will add nutrients to your lawn … but remember mowers can be bad for your back too – so stand directly behind your mower handle with a straight back and hands resting evenly on the handles. 

WHEELBARROWS can be a gardeners best friend IF THEY’RE USED CORRECTLY

·    To avoid hand, back and arm strain do not overload wheelbarrows
·    Stack evenly with the heaviest load over the wheel
·    Keep your back straight while lifting and pushing
·    Rather than lift heavy objects in and out of a wheelbarrow, use a sack barrow instead.

 

FINALLY, if things do go wrong, remember help is only a phone call away at our friendly expert treatment centres. 

 

The South-West is a Great Place to Live … Particularly if you’re a Chiropractor

I remember the first time a came to Somerset I was impressed by the rolling landscape (at the time I lived in Norfolk!) and just how green everything was (three times more rainfall that Norfolk!!).

I moved here twenty years ago and it has been a truly wonderful place to raise a family … but until the British Chiropractic Association published new research into the state of the Nation’s backs, I

had no idea as to the extent to which the South-West topped league tables for suffering in this regard – and what a good place it was to work in restoring backs to normal function.

More people suffer from back pain in the South-West than in any other part of Great Britain – amost half (47%) of the people surveyed reported that they were currently suffering from back pain, compared with just 40% in the South-East.

And the life style in the region appears to be largely responsible for the epidemic: whereas the top trigger – lifting or carrying heavy objects – afflicts fewer than half of London sufferers, it causes pain for 60% of those in the South-West, more than any other part of the UK.

And it’s a similar picture for the second most common cause, prolonged sitting with just over a third of Londoners adversely affected compared with over half of South-Westerners (52%) – once again topping the Nation’s league tables.

So our local population is more likely to need a chiropractor than anywhere else in the country … good news for us at least and would explain why, in the last 20 years, we have expanded from a single clinic with one chiropractor to a chain of clinics with up to half a dozen chiropractors treating over 500 patients every week.

But don’t despair – there’s plenty you can do to help yourself – first of all let’s deal with those top two triggers for back pain:

• Lifting and carrying: Remember to bend from the knees and not the waist when lifting heavy items – you should look like a downhill skier and not a ski jumper. Face in the direction of movement, and take your time. Hold the object as close to your body as possible, and where you can avoid carrying objects which are too heavy to manage alone, ask for help or use the necessary
equipment.
      

• Take a break: When sitting for long periods of time, ensure you stand up and move around every 30 minutes. When at work, also make sure your desk is set up to support a comfortable position. This is different for everyone so if you don’t feel comfortable in your current set up, try altering the height of your chair or screen.

And, if you want to get proactive, the British Chiropractic Association has created a programme of 3-minute exercises, Straighten Up UK, which can be easily slotted in to your daily schedule to help prevent back pain by promoting movement, balance, strength and flexibility in the spine.

If, however, you have pain for more than a few days you should seek professional help. 

All our chiropractors are university educated to Masters level and belong to the Royal College of Chiropractors, who set standards of excellence for management of low back pain. 

So, if you want professional help you to get moving again without pain, help is just a phone call away on 01935 423138 or you can find all our clinics’ contact details at http://www.yeovilchiropractic.co.uk

So how many bones ARE there in a human foot?

Those of you who participated in our Facebook teaser may wonder why totting up the number of bones in the picture didn't automatically equate to a correct answer (26).

If you open a basic anatomy textbook (or Google the question 'how many bones are there in the human foot' then this is, indeed, the answer you are likely to get:

• Seven tarsal bones (Medial, intermediate and lateral cuneiforms; cuboid, talus, navicular, and calcaneus).
• Five metatarsals
• Fourteen palanges – the big toe only has two, the other toes have three (actually to an embryologist, they all have three: the medial cuneiform starts life as a metatarsal; the navicular, which forms the keystone of the longitudinal arch, as a cuneiform and the metatarsal in actually an elongated proximal phalanx).

Total 26.


However …

This ignores the fact that othopaedists will also include the fibula and tibia which are functionally part of the foot, being connected to it by the medial and lateral collateral ligaments – the ones you sprain when you twist your angle.

So that's 28.



Or the fact that the majority of adults have two additional sesamoid bones underneath their big toe, like miniature kneecaps.

So that's 30.




However …

These bones can commonly be bipartate, that is formed in two parts – so that makes 31 … or 32 – and other bones can also be formed in two parts.




However …

There are also dozens of of other, less common, anatomical variants including up to twenty other sesamoid bones, of which the most common is the os trigonum followed by other sesamoidal toe bones.

However …

You can also have extra bones – particularly toes (Anne Boleyn famously has six toes and fingers – and a supernumerary nipple – which helped fuel the assertion she was a witch). Extra toes can form in several ways, with a variety of extra bones forming.




And finally …


You are actually born with just 22 bones in your foot. Several of the tarsal bones are still just cartilage  at birth that gradually develop into bone as you grow over the first decade or so of life. So children have fewer bones initially; however, some bones have more that one ossification centre, which makes it appear that, at some points in time, they have more than 26 bones … or 30 bones … or (my favourite answer), "lots".

Thanks to all who took part.

My shoulder pain isn’t getting better … That’s because it might no be coming from your shoulder!!

As with so much in life, clinical routine has its seasonal features: the overindulgence accident at Christmas; the gardener’s back in March after a winter of inactivity – most of these problems have an obvious cause an effect but there is one problem that strikes every autumn … and nobody is quite sure why.

Ask a chiropractor how they know when autumn has arrived and they will tell you it’s the sudden influx of patients with ‘shoulder’ pain – instead of half-a-dozen per week, suddenly it’s more than half a dozen every single day. 

Theories as to why range from the ‘cold wintery draught on warm skin’ to the effects of rapidly changing day length on serotonin levels, though no theory has yet been proved (it’s not a well-researched subject). What is, however, seems quite clear from clinical experience is that most of these seasonal symptoms are not shoulder pain at all!

If the pain is across the top of your shoulder or between the shoulder blade and the spine, then the chances are it’s coming from your ribs. Patients often look slightly sceptical on being informed that their ‘shoulder’ pain is coming from their costal joints (the joints between the ribs and the vertebrae) – “surely my ribs are in my chest?” they say.  In fact, the top rib actually joins with the base of the neck and acts as an anchor for some of the big muscles that run up the side and back of the neck (which can often feel as if they’ve been ‘pulled’ or ‘cricked’ if the underlying rib is injured).  You can easily feel your top (first) rib, it’s the bony lump you can feel at the base of your neck just behind your collar bone … that’s how high they go.

By comparison, most pain that arises from the joints and muscle of the shoulder is typically felt at the top of the arm. either whether the rotator muscle pass under the collar bone and attach to the arms or coming directly from the joint between the collar bone and shoulder blade or from the cartilage, ligaments and synovium of the ball and socket joint.

The other things patients often complain of is that – unlike ‘true’ shoulder injuries – they’ve no idea how they’ve done it: it just “came on gradually”, or, more commonly, they “woke up with it”.  That’s because the inflammation in the small joints between the ribs and the spine builds up slowly over several hours, so its not the injury (often from lifting at arm’s length) that hurts, it’s the body’s reaction hours later.

So, if you’ve got a intense ache across the top of your shoulder or feel there's a knife in your back just inside the shoulder blade, then you’re probably suffering from costovertebral syndrome, colloquially known as a ‘popped rib’ … and you may well be suffering: it can be one of the most painful of conditions;  fortunately, it is also one of the easiest and quickest for chiropractors to treat, with recovery often in days. 

There's also something you can do to help yourself if you’re suffering from seasonal shoulder symptoms, use an ice pack (or wrap some frozen peas in a tea towel) and apply for ten minutes or so every hour (that will reduce the inflammation), then pick up the phone and ask one of our chiropractic experts for confirmation that it’s your ribs and not your shoulder that are the source of the trouble.

Which is most important: Your teeth, Your Car … Or Your Back?

You brush your teeth and see a dentist; you check you oil and have your car serviced – but when it comes to backs, almost two-thirds people in the South-West have been suffering for up to 10 years and most haven’t done anything about it. 

Suffering in silence is not only causing untold misery to thousands of Somerset residents – it’s also costing business a fortune.  According to research from the British Chiropractic Association, a third of us have had to take time off work because of back or neck pain.

There is a myth that back pain gets better by itself; unfortunately, on the occasions that it does, it nearly always comes back again – and the problems tend to get more serious with time.

Home cures – used by over 90% of sufferers – are often ineffective: the traditional hot water bottle can actually make many types of back pain worse; bed rest also tends to hinder rather than help recovery and recent research has shown paracetamol of no help for back pain … yet these remain the treatment of choice for most people.

There are, of course, things you can do to help your back: our own #5stepping campaign, featured elsewhere on this site, is there to help your back as well as improve your waistline but, if your spine is groaning under the increasing stress of modern life here are our top tips for easing the load:

• Stand up: Sitting for more than 4 hours a day is not just a recipe for spinal suicide, it’s going to damage your general health too. So take regular, short breaks every half an hour and stand and walk whenever you can.

 

• Walk on: All 5-steppers already know the health benefits of walking – it’s simple to add extra steps to your everyday routine.

• Stop slouching: When you are sitting, relax and make sure you have your bottom against the seat back with your shoulder blades touching the back rest of the chair.

• Drive right: Given that we’re all going to be spending longer in our cars for the next few weeks, make sure the seat leans slightly backwards with your elbows at a comfortable angle for driving.

• Drink up: Like the rest of us, backs are 70% water – try replacing one caffeinated drink a day with a glass of water.

The final tip is pure common sense – you don’t wait for your car to break down or your teeth to rot; if your back’s been hurting for more than a few weeks, or if the pain keeps coming back see a chiropractor: managing back pain is how we make our living!

What does a Chiropractor do … on a Tuesday?

Because I work on Saturdays and have Mondays off, Tuesdays start early at 7:30 and begin with an assault on the in-tray: two days’ post, messages, following up patients, phone calls and making sure the social media for the week is planned and posted (thanks goodness for Hootsuite and ‘autoschedule’).

It’s important that the decks are cleared before patients start, because Tuesdays are invariably fully booked … and often overbooked, as was this particular Tuesday, which kicked off fifteen minutes early with an emergency patient, who had cricked their neck sleeping awkwardly the previous day and was nervous about seeing another chiropractor.

The morning consisted of a typical mix of patients: There were twelve cases of low back pain (including one new patient), one hip pain, one ankle injury (tennis), a couple more cases of cervicalgia, and a couple of headache, a child with poor gait, a cartilage injury in the knee, a rotator cuff tendinitis and a lady with temporomandibular disorder … and one no-show, which is always incredibly frustrating when you’re not only full but have people on the waiting list, desperate for appointments.  Fortunately, everyone was getting better and staying better apart from one of the headache patients, who was referred to our next specialist Headache Clinic so the dental and stress components that were preventing the condition from settling could be addressed.

Although I always try to run to time, the last couple of patients proved slightly more complicated than expected and that made lunchtime a bot of a scramble – Tuesday’s morning session is at Yeovil and the afternoon session is at Crewkerne … which gives me the opportunity to stop at home en route and quickly eat a rather belated lunch.

As ever, when time is tight, the traffic on East Street is backed up to Mount Pleasant (someone build a bypass for Crewkerne PLEASE!!) and clinic starts seven minutes late!  This, of course is the immediate cue for patients to be complicated, refactory, or to present with unexpected new conditions.

The first patient was typical of this, a lady with a recovering sacroiliac joint causing buttock pain who had been feeling so much better that she decided to move some furniture and now had raging sciatica and all the signs of a prolapsed lumbar disc.  The next three patients also all had sacroiliac joint problems; however, these were all recovering as per prognosis – improved after three treatments, better after six and two of the patients were ready to start some gentle home-based exercises to stretch out tight, fibrotic muscles and rebuild core stability.

The next case is a tough one – a whiplash injury that has been referred via a solicitor having previously failed to recover.  The delays involved in processing the claim has allowed the injury to become chronic and it’s not just neck pain, like a lot of whiplash there is also a jaw problem (which is preventing the neck from settling), back pain and a shoulder injury … all made worse by the stress of dealing with solicitors and the whole compensation process. Today, at last, there is some sign of improvement: everything is moving better and hurting less – but with so many areas to treat, there is no chance of catching up and now I’m running almost quarter of an hour late.There is, however, no point in worrying about that … most patients understand that sometimes you need to spend longer with a patient – next time, it could be them! 

Fortunately, the next lady in is a new patient: at last a chance to sit down for a few minutes and to take a case history. Fortunately too, her case is relatively straightforward: a long history of migraines, which sound like they’re coming from the neck with no evidence of anything sinister or untoward going on – the physical examination confirms the diagnosis and there’s time to start a course of treatment which turns out to solve fifteen years of weekly misery in just  couple of weeks!

The rest of the evening is full of complicated patients: a knee riddled with osteoarthritis that would probably do better with surgery but the lady’s determined to avoid the kind at all costs; neck pain in an eighty-four-year old lady with osteoporosis who needs particularly careful handling; another case of low back pain following not one but two car accidents (the neck and jaw had already responded to treatment); a lady with back hip and knee pain; a cervical disc injury causing arm pain and, to finish the day, a disc problem which is stubbornly refusing to respond to treatment and needs referral for magnetic resonance imaging in Bridgwater, where we have a special arrangement … all of which means that clinic finishes fifteen minutes late – which is still quarter of an hour earlier than the rest of the week (for historical reasons, Tuesday’s Crewkerne clinic ends at 6:30 rather than 7).

Home at 7pm having left at 7am. Although there is stuff to be done (when isn’t there?), the lure of an early night proves irresistible: tomorrow is going to be another early start with budgets, cashflow forecasts and marketing analysis all to do before another 36-patient day and a fresh brain will be required.