Back Injury: Understanding Desensitisation & Why You Should Take Care Of The Sensitisation Of Your Low Back First

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Welcome to the Back Pain Solutions Podcast – Back Injury: Understanding Desensitisation & Why You Should Take Care Of The Sensitisation Of Your Low Back First

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Introducing Back Injury: Understanding Desensitisation & Why You Should Take Care Of The Sensitisation Of Your Low Back First

When recovering from a low back injury you need to take the appropriate steps in order to recover effectively and build tolerance in the long term. Far too often people rely on passive treatment alone to support their recovery, without understanding that the simple things they’re doing every day are often contributing to the problem!! How can you get better if every day you’re aggravating your back injury? Unfortunately, most people do not understand the impact that simple actions have on their back health and they continue down a path to chronic pain, frustration, and sometimes depression. Understanding the role, you play in your injury will help you overcome your back pain and prevent you suffering over the longer term.

In this second episode of the four-part series we introduce the concept of desensitisation and why this is the first step in the recovery process. We discuss how this can be managed, and why you as the patient play a fundamental role in this process! You will learn the difference between nociceptive pain and neuropathic pain and how chronic pain occurs. You will also learn how to ‘tune in’ to your back health so you can analyse the actions you take throughout the day to identify the things that are aggravating your back pain so you can start to find ways to avoid them.

Some of the things you’ll discover…

What is neuropathic pain versus nociceptive pain
Why focusing on desensitisation is an important first step to recovery
How patients often continue to stimulate neuropathic pain, preventing recovery
How becoming aware of the pain triggers, and taking an active role in recovery, is so important
Why you need to record the pain triggers that you are experiencing so you can find strategies to avoid them
The importance of thoughtful movement!

Show Highlights

How taking ownership of your rehabilitation and understanding that you play an important role in your own recovery is non negotiable. Not only will this help you to get better but in the longer term it will help you avoid chronic injury, help you build strength and help improve your overall health. You don’t want to focus on simply freeing yourself from pain but you want to focus on building strength, endurance, and better back health so you can confidently do the things you love without question!

Episode Transcription

Unknown Speaker 0:00
When we’re young, we move with freedom and confidence with a great resilience to injury. But somewhere along the line we develop poor habits and become more vulnerable to back pain, back pain solutions features evidence based and practical advice to help you take back control of your health and get back to the activities you love. This is your guide to better back health through movement. So join us as we demystify some of the commonly held beliefs about back pain and build your confidence to a stronger back the smart way.

Jacob Steyn 0:28
Hi there, everybody and welcome back to the back pain solutions podcast. I’m here today alone doing another solo. And today we’re going to talk about desensitizing. First, as part of your strategy to getting better from low back pain. So we’re going to look at why desensitizing is so important to back health and why it’s so absolutely necessary. Depending on where you come from with Chronic injury and why we have to address this as the first step to building tolerance. So the previous podcast was the intro on building tolerance. And that was where we discussed the broad outline for the steps you need to take to recover from a low back injury. And today is the second of a series of four episodes, where we’re going to look at how to build that tolerance. So let’s discuss this point a little bit further and look at what I really mean with desensitizing.

So generally, if you have a chronic low back injury, you probably have reached the point where we go into what is called neuropathic pain. And you don’t have to have a big understanding of neuropathic pain, but you need to understand a little bit what is meant by neuropathic pain compared to normal nociceptive pain and nociceptive pain is where we have pain. That is the standard warning system of the body acting up to tell you look, don’t put your hand on something hot or you know there’s a lot of pressure on your finger, it starts hurting now remove the finger. And it’s a great way to tell you what not to do, where not to go that you have a danger of dying when you step in front of a car. These basic alarm system function of the of the body where you’re getting warned or being told where to stay to stay safe compared to when you have neuropathic pain.

We have a pain system that’s activated not by stimulating the nerve endings through pressure or heat or something sharp, but the actual pain system in other words, the nerves going from the receptor site, all the way to the spinal cord of the spinal cord and even the brain. This part of the nervous system becomes sensitized because of chronic bombardment of pain. In other words, now the pain starts being felt much easier and much more, with only a little bit of a pain stimulation, or sometimes no pain stimulation will result in you feeling pain. And so that’s, in a nutshell, in summary, the idea behind neuropathic pain. And so we quite often, when we have a chronic injury, develop this neuropathic pain aspect. And so if we don’t take care of that neuropathic pain, then we don’t really have a good chance of recovering. So that’s the first step is we have to desensitize the pain system.

Now, if you think about it, how did we sensitize the pain system in the first place. So that happens when we have a chronic injury and we keep looking up that pain trigger. In other words, we keep stimulating the very thing that caused the neuropathic pain to develop. And so we are actually our worst enemy. In that case, we, we keep stimulating and perpetuating the problem and we keep it, we keep it up. In other words, we don’t allow it to recover. And so, if you keep stimulating the neuropathic pain, you are moving further away from the actual point of recovery. So, like I said, we have to desensitize the pain system. We, especially, while we focus on two things, and the first one is to allow the injury site to relax. In other words, we want to take pressure off the low back. We want to limit the forces the unwanted forces going through the back. Sometimes when the tissue is so injured and sensitive. It means that minimal compression, even in a safe, say, a safe direction between the vertebrae, especially when when we’re talking about a disc injury or discolored tissue injury, even minimal pressure would already trigger a pain trigger. And so we need to be very aware of our tolerance at that moment. And if we go over this line of tolerance and we keep stimulating and sensitizing that injury site, it just means that we’re the reason that it’s not getting better. So we have to desensitize. So we have to become aware of what causes the pain trigger and we need to eliminate that eliminate that as those movements and those forces through the back. As much as possible, and then we need to look at strategies to decompress. In other words, relax the tissue. So there are numerous strategies that we can follow to do that. And I suggest if you want to know more about these strategies, go head over to the website and look at the videos and information or maybe even the program or, you know, look at their free ebook download that we have on the smart, strong website.

So that’s something that we have to be aware of, and that is the very first step. So in other words to desensitize, we need to look up the relaxation from time to time throughout the day. In other words, we need to decompress the back, decompress the tissues that cannot stand the compression or as much as you’re giving it and then we need to avoid the pain trigger. And so, in the first episode I talked about becoming aware of the pain triggers. And you need to pay attention throughout the day, what movements causes the pain trigger, getting up from a chair, getting into the car, getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, putting on your socks, picking up something from the floor. If it’s your work where you have to constantly reach over and pick something up, that might be a pain trigger, you need to become very aware of these things and find a strategy, whether it’s bracing the spine, so protecting the spine when you pick these things up or you make these movements, or whether it’s learning to maintain a neutral spine, lock the spine, in other words, brace and moving through the hip joints. There are numerous strategies to do this. And the idea is to find the best strategy for every situation that you’re in. We want to emphasize that over and over and over, until we become really good at doing that with minimal thought. And some patients would ask me, yeah, it should be some kind of second nature. I don’t think about it. And I like to say, you know, you’ll always have to think about it until your back is better. But the more you do it, the less you have to think about it. And the easier it becomes, in other words, that protected movement that you’re going to make isn’t going to require a lot of thinking of, Okay, I need to do this, I need to stabilize here, I need to twist through there. Now it’s going to be one thought, and you do it in the correct manner.

So, the third thing we have to think of with desensitization, is exactly what I mentioned just now it’s fourth full movement. So we want to decompress or look for relaxation strategies. We want to look for pain trigger avoidance, especially throughout the day and we want to think of thoughtful movement. so thoughtful movement is just taking the time to evaluate what is the pain trigger, and what’s causing the pain. So I quite often have a patient who says, you know, but I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that. And sometimes you’ll have to do things that will still cause you pain, but it’s a matter of making the most of your situation. So, don’t throw in the towel and say, Look, I’ve got to do these things, and I just get through it. And I’m going to hope for the best or, you know, it’s almost weekend. And the reality is that if we, if we do that, we have a much smaller chance of getting better. So as my my good friend Ben always says, you know, take ownership of your body take ownership of getting better and these are the first steps that you need to start acting on to take ownership of your recovery. Right. So we, we always talk about an active recovery where you’re, you’re the responsible one for what happens to your body. And that’s exactly what we would like you to do. Because if you take ownership and you create good healthy habits, it’s not only something that’s going to help you to get better, but it’s also going to help you to maintain in the long run a safe movement pattern, which is going to item which is not only going to make you stronger, but also going to give you the confidence to do things without having to worry about falling back into a chronic pain back injury state.

So this was the second video of a series of four and next time around. We’re going to speak about spinal hygiene. So we will look at the different strategies we can perform and talk about them to make sure you understand what’s necessary, as, as we just talked about fault for movement is another term for spinal hygiene to get you to recover from, for example, a chronic low back injury. So thank you very much for listening to me. And please head over to iTunes, give us a rating there. And if you want to go have a look on the website, and download the free ebook, and I hope to see you in the next podcast. Bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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