Pain can be a helpful messenger or an alert that something in your body needs fixing. However, at a certain point, it can become an annoyance that lessens your quality of life. To make matters worse, many pain problems are rooted in deep-set underlying conditions, often originating in a different part of the body than the part exhibiting symptoms. Medication may mask your pain temporarily, but it isn’t going to solve a chronic underlying functional problem. If you’ve been losing more and more of your mobility and productivity due to chronic pain, you need to hear about the benefits of physiotherapy.
Physiotherapy is a safe, natural, and effective path to pain relief. If you’re curious about how physiotherapy can benefit you, contact Newcastle Physiotherapy in Newcastle, ON today to request an appointment. Our team of physiotherapists is happy to help get you started on an individualized treatment plan.
Are you ready to find natural relief with physiotherapy?
Our physiotherapists can succeed where painkilling drugs fail. Once we understand the actual origin point of your pain, we can prescribe a physiotherapy regimen aimed at correcting (or at least reducing) that functional abnormality.
Our physiotherapists may start by addressing your immediate discomfort with passive physiotherapy techniques. These natural treatment techniques can include any combination of:
- Electrical muscle stimulation, which uses tiny amounts of current to stimulate your body’s natural painkillers (endorphins)
- Heat or cold applications to reduce swelling and inflammation
- Ultrasound therapy, in which sound waves enhance blood flow and relax tight muscle fibers
- Deep tissue massage to break an adhesions grip on your internal tissues
Once you’re responding to passive physiotherapy, we can introduce active physiotherapy. Our physioherapists can prescribe exercises that address both localized pain and referred pain problems.
For instance, gentle stretching exercises from our physiotherapists can loosen tight, painful muscles and increase mobility in arthritic joints, while core training exercises that correct your balance may relieve chronic strain or neurological symptoms in the body.
How effective is physiotherapy as a drug-free natural pain solution? The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) states that non-pharmaceutical pain treatment is to be preferred over pharmaceuticals such as opioids ‒ and may actually do a better job of controlling pain conditions.
Why you should try to avoid opioids
Both opioid prescription rates and deaths from opioid overdoses have quadrupled in the last two decades. Given these identical statistics, one can’t escape the obvious conclusion: Reliance on painkillers has gotten out of hand, and the consequences can be literally fatal.
Beyond extreme physical risk, over-reliance on prescription painkillers can have other detrimental effects on your health.
Withdrawal symptoms can be severe. And while you’re still using them, opioids can lead to depression, which sets up a vicious cycle of self-medicating in order to feel better emotionally as well as physically.
So, why am I in pain?
The cause of acute pain may be clear enough, especially if it accompanies an auto accident injury, work injury, infection, operation or other event.
As the affected part of your body heals, the pain generally fades away. But this is not necessarily the case with some forms of pain. Chronic pain may linger for months or years with no obvious cause in sight. This pain may be due to:
- Chronic overuse injuries such as tendinitis, plantar fasciitis or carpal tunnel syndrome
- Chronic pain syndromes such as fibromyalgia, which may affect both nerves and muscles
- Muscle weakness, knots or spasms related to poor posture or an unbalanced body
- Degenerative joint conditions such as osteoarthritis, which produce chronic pain and inflammation
- Extended disuse after a lengthy recovery period (such as frozen shoulder after many weeks with your arm in a sling)
- Areas of internal scar tissue buildup that restrict neighboring muscles and connective tissues (adhesions)
Modern medicine tends to turn to drugs early and often in an effort to alleviate pain problems. Unfortunately, this approach may turn out to be nothing more than a stopgap.
The drugs may mute the pain for a few hours, but the underlying problem that’s causing the pain remains untreated. As long as that problem persists, so will your long-term pain problems.
This may force you to use more and more medication ‒ a troubling proposition, especially for addictive personalities or individuals who are already on other medications.
Tackle your pain at its source – contact Newcastle Physiotherapy today
Our physiotherapists are ready to help you stop your pain at its source, with no need for drugs. Call our Newcastle, ON physiotherapy office today to schedule your appointment!
