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

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!

My Shoulder is Frozen!

Have you ever had a shoulder joint that’s painful and restricted?  The chances are you probably thought it was a ‘frozen shoulder’ – and the chances are you were probably wrong!

As with some of the previous terms we’ve discussed, such as sciatica and migraines, the problem lies in part with the difference between what you might mean by ‘frozen shoulder’ (it hurts and I can’t move it properly) and what a musculoskeletal specialist means by ‘frozen shoulder’ (very specifically, adhesive capsulitis) … and differentiating between the two is very important as they can have very different treatments and outcomes.

The shoulder is the most complicated joint in the body – in fact, it’s not one joint at all, it’s three joints plus the articulation between the shoulder blade and the top seven ribs.  If it’s going to work properly, there are over 100 joints, muscles, ligaments and bursae that have to we working normally and integrate smoothly.  Fortunately, of all the things that can go wrong, frozen shoulder (or adhesive capsulitis as we should call it from now on) is one of the less common.

#5Stepping Part 2: Stepping Out!

The second step to a healthier, wealthier you is almost as simple as the first: keep drinking the water… and start taking some steps – and more than just five of them!

Once upon a time when, if you wanted to get somewhere, walking was most likely the only option.  As hunter-gatherers, most days would have probably involved walking ten to twelve miles, presumably with days off if a mammoth had been bagged recently.  Then someone invented the wheel, domesticated oxen to pull them, bred horses to pull them faster and discovered how crude oil could be refined to make them go with a bang.  These days, few people even manage ten miles per week.

I’ve been told I’ve got … Migraines

I’ve been told I’ve got … Migraines.

One of the commonest medical presentations is headaches, and the consultation often opens “I think I’ve got migraines” … but when is a migraine not a migraine?