Have you been told that your pain or problem is ‘scar tissue’ from an old injury

Or that it is arthritis, that it’s your age or ‘part of getting old’.

It may well be that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes without reason.

‘Nothing can be done”, you just have to get on with it

The longer it persists, the harder it becomes to remember life without your problem.

Image by Justus Menke – Unsplash

We all start as a baby

Under our skin, we all have similar anatomy, give or take gender or an anomaly or two.

Like a baby, we all learn movement through necessity, often with a goal in mind. We use whatever is available at the time: physically, emotionally, academically.

Getting dressed, putting on shoes and going out for a walk is routine for most of us.

Yet none of us will remember the exact moment that we took our first steps or learned how to dress independently.

As a result, whatever we did at that time worked and we probably walk and get dressed in a similar way now.

Yet when you’re in pain, your usual way of getting dressed hurts

And it does not take long to work out that putting your painful arm into the coat hurts less.

Meaning that you can dress and carry on with apparently more important things.

Consequently putting your painful arm in first is yet another subtle adaptation to pain in response to a problem that you did not even know that you had.

We adapt and we adapt until we cannot adapt anymore

We can respond to physical injury, increased emotional stress or even the need to ‘get something done’ quickly in a myriad of ways. Usually we will find a quick and easy shortcut.

But these short-term strategies can become hard wired habits that do not serve in the long term. Putting your painful arm into your jacket reduces your shoulder pain but does not address the actual cause of your painful shoulder.

If you have discomfort getting dressed, struggle putting on shoes or wince when you walk, it suggests that there may be a better way. And for the majority of my patients and the multitude of problems that they present with, this is often true.

Perhaps your pain or problem is your body’s way of trying to tell you something

Your body does not speak a language that we understand.

Consider that the body communicates via noxious sensation such as pain, discomfort and pins and needles. However, often we do not know what to make of these unpleasant sensations.

Yet they have the capacity to stop you doing what you want to do.

My job is to help guide you to discover new ways of moving without pain

A clue to solving your pain puzzle is that pain is an output from your brain. Change the input to change the output.

We will explore movement, hands on therapy and clever thinking to help you find pain free movement and function.

As a physiotherapist that enjoys exploring movement and exercise, I can help and guide you back to what you love to do.

My clinic is in Blackwell Lane in Darlington, click on the contact form below to discuss how I can help you.