Relieve Low Back Pain | Reduce Low Back Pain | Canada's Leading Authority in Human Movement | Dev Chengkalath

As a head’s up, this post is a little longer than usual (that too after a LOT of cutting and editing!) but I felt that I needed to put it all together instead of splitting it up.

As I stated in my last post, how is it possible that with the ever-growing body of available knowledge, with the lightning-paced expansion of medical science and with all the incredible technological advances, that we still fail our clients in modern medicine?

I feel as though I came close to some sort of an answer to the above just recently.

Or at the very least a brief glimpse into what could be part of the answer (or maybe a better way of putting it would be part of the problem!).

I know I started off by talking about chronic pain, but this realization could just as easily relate to almost any type of pain or injury.

In our hurried and hectic world, we’ve stopped treating the person and we’ve started treating just the symptoms.

The Search for Symptomatic Relief.

I realize that this isn’t exactly Earth shattering or groundbreaking news. I won’t be getting any CNN headlines with this one.

But I think a good number of people in the medical health professions forget this basic tenet, and I know I’ve been guilty of this as well.

This became very aparent to me these past few weeks when I was working with a new client. In the years that this client had been seeking the care and guidance of his various healthcare professionals for chronic pain, no one had ever asked this client what was going on in his life.

Every appointment, meeting, or test was set-up solely for the purposes of medical assessment rather than human interaction. This gentleman had seen everyone for his pain. However, all of his practitioners were too busy to actually talk to him. He’d been put through the gamut of diagnostics from MRIs to CT scans and everything in-between.

Sadly…

No one asked him what was going on in his life now.

No one asked him what was going on in his life when the pain started.

No one tried to discern any of the social or emotional stressors that would exacerbate or propagate altered pain responses.

Because that is what chronic pain usually is.

It is, in a very broad sense, an abnormal, painful response to non-painful stimuli. Things that shouldn’t hurt, do.

In modern medicine, we’ve become so disjointed and specialized that we’ve forgotten that everyday stressors do impact how our bodies respond to our environment. We forget the elegance that is the construction of our physical selves.

Whether you believe in creationism or in evolution or something in between, you would be hard pressed to deny that the body knows what’s going on inside itself.

Eventually, these distinct stressors are replaced by amorphous, diffuse stressors that no longer resemble the original instigator.

And this takes me back to what I believe are the top three causes of pain (be it low back pain, knee pain or any other type):

1. Lack of knowledge-What’s causing, contributing or exacerbating the problem?

2. Motor Control-How do we move? How do we stay still? How is our body awareness?

3. De-conditioning-Are we using aging as a cop out and letting our bodies degenerate? Can we tolerate physical stressors?

Drop your comments and let me know what you think

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

During my time as a physical therapist, I’ve come across a fairly significant number of individuals suffering from chronic pain.

These people have experienced pain for far longer than what would be expected from their form of injury or they had pain with no known cause that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

No trauma, no falls, no apparent reason for their debilitating pain and discomfort.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seemed to have had an influx of clients come in with long-standing complaints of chronic pain similar to the above.

While completing the assessments and taking the histories, I found myself asking some of the same questions over and over again.

Mostly to myself, I would hear my deep masculine voice in my head (I swear that’s what my voice sounds like!) asking:

Why were these individuals still in pain, over such a long period of time, when there wasn’t any significant physical or organic cause for the pain?

Many had been tested using all the latest in technology from MRIs to CT scans to doppler imaging. Scopes, probes, blood and tissue samples etcetera etcetera.

It would seem as though no medical stone was left unturned.

Multiple medications had been prescribed and ingested. Referrals had been conducted. Second, third and fourth opinions had been sought. Specialists consulted. Therapies rendered. The list goes on.

But still no solutions.

And often, even no hope of salvation from the unyielding shackles of pain were given…Typical responses included “you’ll have to learn to live with it.”

With the exponential growth of medical science, why were these people still suffering?

Why were they still at the mercy of the relentless battering placed upon their bodies, minds and spirits by this crushing beast we call chronic pain?

As my cognitive wheels were turning, I kept coming back to a single question. It kept repeating over and over again in my head:

Where had modern medicine failed them?

In my next blog post I’ll discuss in greater detail HOW modern medicine missed out. And what you can do to fill in those gaps to protect yourself or your loved ones.

Yours in movement,

Dev Chengkalath

In my experience as a physical therapist, a majority of my “bad back” clients hobble in the clinic door only when they’re in the midst of a disabling episode of low back pain.

And when I say hobble, I really do mean hobble. In many cases, they’ll be doubled up, limping and staggering with their faces contorted in agony. 

In fact, I’ve seen that pain grimace so many times I take it as their version of a friendly hello.

Friendly Hello!?

Sadly, this is usually a “typical” case of acute low back pain for them. By typical I mean a flare-up of their long-standing back issues. I’ve had clients come in with histories of low back pain spanning almost their whole lifetimes.

Some longer than I’ve been alive! 

Some caused by trauma such as falls or motor vehicle crashes. Others caused by sports or athletic related injuries.

But most often, these poor souls have just been mistreating their poor backs for way too long. 

Could you imagine 15, 20, 30 or more years of intermittent, chronic low back pain? 

What’s your magic number? How many days, weeks, months or years will you let it go on?

Two? Three? Four? Five? Ten? Twenty? More?

Leave a comment and let me know how long you’ve been suffering and what you’ve tried in the past. Let me know what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Yours in health.

Dev Chengkalath