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. 

 

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 should you give your body for Christmas?

You’ve ordered the turkey, hung the stockings and wrapped the presents. Chances are you’re either feeling footsore or your neck is stiff; your back may be giving out alarming twinges as you decorate the tree or your shoulders can’t reach to hang the mistletoe; your knees might be making alarming sounds as you squat down to put warm ham in the oven or the sciatica could be protesting at sitting through the Christmas Downton Abbey special.

At any one time, a third of us are suffering from musculoskeletal pain – so what could you consider putting under the tree to help alleviate that aches and pains that are waiting for you in 2016?  Here are our top tips for healing and pampering those painful problems.

•   Do you need a new mattress?

The average lifespan of a mattress is about seven years, even with regular turning, though a top of the range model might last twice as long … and you won’t get one of these for under £1,000. You might baulk at spending that much on a mattress but ask yourself this: How much did you spend on your three-piece suite? – and how long do you spend sitting on it compared with the amount of time you spend in your bed?

• And how about a pillow to go with it?

One of the questions we’re asked most often is ‘which pillow should I use?’.  The problem is there’s no easy answer to this … trial and error tends to lead to the best solution.  There are hundreds of ‘orthopaedic’ pillows on the market and the best way to tell if it suits you is to use it.  This can be expensive, which is why we keep a stock of pillows for (non-smoking) patients to try (smokers’ breath makes the pillow unusable after a fortnight’s trial).  The rule is that a pillow should keep your neck in line with the rest of your spine – which will also depend on how hard your mattress is – and remember goose down may well be better than the most modern hi-tech materials.

• And when you’re awake?

The right office workstation can make all the difference. Your office chair should have adjustable height, tilt and a sprung back; it should have arms that are level with the top of your desk.  Typically such a chair will set you back around £120 – and it costs even less to make sure your screen is at the right height and that you’re using the right hardware: a trackball can put so much less strain on your arms and shoulders than a mouse for half the price of a chiropractic treatment.

 

• Prevention is better than cure

We spend a lot of time discussing with patients how to prevent problems.  We have masseuses in all our clinics to prevent the build-up of muscle tension and an Alexander Technique practitioner to remedy postural problems and we prescribe exercises to move fibrosis and improve stability.

• Put it right

If it hurts, it’s because something’s wrong.  If it keeps on hurting, it’s because there’s too much wrong for your body to heal – which is when you need a helping chiropractic hand.

How to avoid Christmas being a pain in the …

Of all the clinics of the year, the ones immediately after Christmas are the one that stirs the most emotions.  Although we’re used to a wide range of presenting complaints, the ones following the season of festive brouhaha, are often the most bizarre but often reflect how a family’s seasonal holiday was ruined by avoidable injury.

Most existing patients are rightly keen to prevent this, which is why the December patient lists are groaning at the seams as people book for ore-Christmas check-ups or finally resolve to fix the niggles that may have been mothering them for days, all to be right for the Big Ho-ho-ho.

So what steps can you take to avoid musculoskeletal misery over Yule tide?

• Don’t stress yourself out.  Christmas is often a time that we spend with people we feel we ought to rather than people we want to – and emotional stress causes muscular tension far more often that it puts your blood pressure up. Plan to be cheerful and polite but build in some solitude time so the effort doesn’t have to be constant: anything from a soak in hot tub to testing out the kids’ new headphones.

• The one thing we all tend to do more at Christmas is be sedentary – be it standing for hours peeling the sprouts or slumped on the sofa watching Downton Abbey. Prolonged standing and sitting are both bad for the spine, so vary your position and take every opportunity to move about, preferably before it starts to hurt!

• When we do finally decide that we’ve spent too long indoors, what do we do?  Go out for an over-ambitious Boxing Day family ramble with no thought as to how far each member of the group might be able to walk comfortably, and often we chose places that are guaranteed to cause backache: walking on broken surfaces such as shingle beaches or through thick mud will often trigger low back problems – the key rule: little and often beats seldom and long!

• Most people’s Christmas includes a tipple … or three.  But if you don’t want it to lead to injury, then DO mix your drinks: intersperse an alcoholic drink with a soft one, and put a glass of mineral water next to your wine on the dining table (as all #5steppers know).  Alcohol induced injuries include falling asleep in awkward positions, muscular dehydration and falls.

• The final danger – and one that often strains the physician’s straight-face – is the over-exuberant unaccustomed activity. Every year we see uncles who thought they could beat their niece at Twister; Wii-induced Granny pains from the expectation that they could play living-room tennis in the same way as they did the real thing half a century ago; pulls, twists and sprains from over-ambitious romance gone wrong (you don’t have to lift someone off their feet to kiss them under the mistletoe) and no Dad should be allowed to dance after more than 5 units of alcohol (if at all).

… and finally, when you’re lifting the turkey out of the oven – bend your knees!