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Back Pain Eased by Good Posture

Long-term back pain can be relieved through encouraging sufferers to adopt good posture through the Alexander technique, say UK researchers.

Low back pain is one of the most common conditions seen by GPs>

The technique teaches patients how to sit, stand and walk in a way that relieves pain by focusing on their coordination and posture.

Until now there had been little evidence of the therapy’s long term effectiveness.
The latest work is published in the British Medical Journal.
About half the UK population suffers from back pain during a year with up to 15% going on to have chronic problems.

It is the second biggest cause of sick leave, accounting for five million lost working days a year.

The trial was funded by the Medical Research Council and the NHS Research and Development fund.

Longer-term relief
Researchers from Bristol and Southampton universities used a combination of normal GP care, massage and Alexander technique lessons on 463 patients over the course of a year.

They found that by the end, the Alexander patients suffered just three days back pain a month.

This compared to 21 days for those receiving GP care, which tended to include regular consultations, pain killers and exercise regimes for some, and 14 for those who had massages.

The Alexander patients were split into two – one group received 24 lessons and one six.

Those who had 24 lessons were suffering just three days pain, compared to 11 for the other group.

Lead researcher Professor Debbie Sharp said using the Alexander technique should provide help to most people with back pain.

She added: “Lessons in the Alexander technique offer an individualised approach to develop skills that help people recognise, understand, and avoid poor habits affecting postural tone and neuromuscular coordination.

“It can potentially reduce back pain by limiting muscle spasm, strengthening postural muscles, improving coordination and flexibility, and decompressing the spine.”

Dries Hettinga, researcher manager for Back Care, a charity which offers support and advice to people with back pain, said: “There is little evidence available about the effectiveness of the Alexander technique so this research is welcome.

“The Alexander technique is something we do recommend and the feedback we have got is good.

“But I would say that it may not be effective for everyone. Back pain is different for each person and you often need a combination of things to help relieve it.”

Sources:BBC NEWS:Aug.19th. ’08

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Does Pain Serve a Purpose?

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It’s a Warning System, Not a Character-Building Tool.

Remember the 1970s television series “Kung Fu”  Each episode opened with scenes of a stoic Shaolin monk, played by David Carradine, enduring excruciating physical challenges    walking over burning coals and lifting a hot cauldron with his forearms. Pain was portrayed as a critical part of the monk’s path to spiritual and personal growth.

CLICK & SEE

To be sure, individuals can gain confidence and pride by pushing themselves to complete marathons or other demanding physical challenges. But enduring pain or stress injuries on a regular basis serves no good purpose for the body or soul, researchers say.

“Good pain is the body’s warning system,” said Dr. Edward Covington, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Chronic Pain Rehabilitation Program. “Intense nociceptic pain is the good pain. It’s the pain that warns you your appendix is about to rupture or someone has stepped on your foot.”

While many would consider a life without pain as a blessing, it is anything but that for those who suffer from a rare disorder that leaves them unable to feel pain. The condition   called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, and also known as CIPA   affects nerve endings. Because sufferers have no ability to sense pain, they are vulnerable to serious cuts, fractures and burns. Covington said this is a particularly difficult disorder to manage and can leave a person seriously compromised by injury by adolescence.

Most people are not disabled by nociceptic pain, which is pain caused by injury or trauma to the body’s tissues, but rather by chronic pain, Covington said. Indeed, about 70 million Americans are partially or completely disabled by chronic, debilitating pain, according to the National Pain Foundation. And despite advances in pain treatment, many people encourage themselves to dismiss or ignore pain.

“We have a tendency to think people who don’t complain about pain are macho, Clint Eastwood-types, and those who do complain are wimpy,” Covington said.

But research suggests otherwise. “There are a number of genetic differences in enzymes and in individuals’ opioid receptors that these ‘tough guys’ may simply not be experiencing pain,” Covington said.

‘Good Pain’ vs. ‘Bad Pain’

When treating pain, patients and their primary care doctors too often overlook the distinction between good pain and bad pain, many specialists say. Patients want to know exactly what’s causing their pain, and physicians often go looking for an underlying physical cause. But this is often the wrong approach. “In many cases, the pain itself is the disease,” Covington said.

“We need to recognize that all pain doesn’t have a somatic [bodily] origin,” said Dr. Todd Sitzman, medical director of The Center for Pain Medicine in Hattiesburg, Miss.

Like Covington, Sitzman recommends a multidisciplinary approach to pain management. Cognitive-behavioral therapy can have a great effect in pain management. Through therapy, Sitzman said, “patients can reduce their sense of suffering by changing maladaptive behaviors and learning new coping strategies.”

Patients may also need to change their diets, adopt or alter exercise regimes or address psychological problems to make real progress in alleviating chronic pain. But, he admits, “There are no magic potions.”

Pain as an Opportunity

Dave Markowitz, author of Perspectives: A Radical Approach to Healing, is on the other end of the healing spectrum. The son of a pharmacist, Markowitz decided to take a decidedly non-pharmaceutical route to addressing chronic pain, using everything from meditation to spiritual channeling with his clients.

Markowitz believes chronic pain can signal underlying emotional or spiritual concerns. He turned to alternative therapies when Western medicine failed to alleviate his pain. And as a man who actually has walked across a bed of hot coals, Markowitz has developed an interesting perspective on pain. “Any situation including pain can be a burden or an opportunity. Pain can be a friend, if we look at it as an opportunity,” he said.

For Markowitz, getting to the emotional root of pain can be the key to unlocking it. He said he had an extraordinarily successful session with a client who said she had suffered from sciatica for 40 years. With Markowitz’s help, the woman came to realize that her pain was associated with feelings of responsibility, tied to her relationship with her daughter. By the end of the session, Markowitz said, the woman said 80 percent of her pain was gone.

In diagnosing chronic pain, Markowitz said, patients and physicians can get “locked in” to a certain treatment plan. “There are people who really need medication. However, the pain doesn’t go away. It just gets blocked with the medication. I believe this can set off a chain reaction, and a downward spiral of ill-health.

“If someone’s experiencing pain for decades, it seems sensible that we should look at other types of treatment to address the pain,” he said.

Markowitz said he emphasizes personal empowerment, and that healing can come fairly quickly when a client is mentally ready. “The last thing I want is to see a client for six months,” he said.

High-Tech vs. Alternative Treatments

These sorts of nontraditional therapies are being embraced by more medical practitioners, but many people still believe a pill or injection is the only way to deal with serious pain.

“Americans have been seduced by technology. It’s exciting and sexy and incredibly profitable. But there is no treatment that is as effective as a multi-treatment rehab program,” said the Cleveland Clinic’s Covington.

“Cognitive therapies, for example, cost less and carry far less risk than surgery and pharmaceutical treatments, but tend to get short shrift and government and insurance companies often don’t cover it,” he said.

Covington believes that patients and doctors too often want quick and easy fixes to a problem. “You can write a prescription in 30 seconds and the patient can take a pill in 30 seconds. What we see happening is Americans spending more for health care, but they may be getting less health.”

Source:ABC News

According to me our human body is a super computer and whenever there is a trouble in any part of the body the computer gives a signal which is pain.In our house we have smoke detecter which starts whistling as and when there is smoke which may cause harm.Our normal duty is to find the cause of the smoke first,stop it and then of course we stop the whistling sound.If we are busy only to stop the whistling sound, the house may get burnt. Similarly whenever there is pain in any part of the body, we should first stop the cause of the pain instead of taking some painkeeler(which may have several bad side effects) and stop the pain.Alternative medicine always tries to see the cause of the pain and try to remove the cause and at the same time stops the pain.

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