As a chiropractor, I focus a lot on education to drive long-term results. As such, we usually do a community project every month. This can be anything from an online webinar to a in-person workshop. We also host social nights and open houses so we can get to you outside of a clinical setting.
If you are have missed out on our ‘How To Get Rid Of Endless Pain’ webinar, our team has put a recorded version on Teachable. It’s free and you can access it at your own time. Do note that once you “enrolled” for the webinar, you have to finish watching it within 24 hours. The free access is only for 24 hours!
What is the webinar about?
The webinar is really a lot more of sharing our method to approaching pain management, and what sets us apart from our chiropractic or even physiotherapy clinics.
For privacy reasons, we have removed most of the personal sharings from the participants.
During the webinar, we share a lot of pain science research. Our suggestion is to consider what does the latest research say about pain and compare it to your current beliefs and attitudes towards pain. From there, think about what you can do differently that would be more helpful for your recovery.
If you want the references for the studies I discussed, please feel free to reach out to us. Alternatively, have a flick through our website. We promise they can all be found somewhere within the 300+ articles on our site.
I am sorry but there is no easy solution.
One of the participants who attended one of our webinars told us that the session was not helpful at all, and that he learnt nothing from it. Upon further discussion, we found that he was right. He did learn nothing from it.
The problem, however, was not that he already knew what we shared. Rather, there was a lack of application of what was shared to what he is currently doing.
If you don’t change what you are doing, you will get the same results! Assuming you are still here researching on viable pain solutions, it would be fair to say what you are currently doing is not good enough to help you achieve a full recovery. As such, something has to change.
Stop doing what doesn’t work. Start thinking bigger.
Back to the participant who feedbacked that he learnt nothing. We learnt that he was doing two things: stretching and strengthening. I am not going to discuss in great detail why they don’t work here because, really, you should check out the webinar.
Here’s the thing: stretching doesn’t work. We have research to show that stretching doesn’t meaningfully increase your flexibility. If you want to increase your flexibility, there are more effective methods.
When it comes to stretching as a modality to reduce injury risk, stretching also doesn’t work. Stretching improves your risk of injury by 4% while stretch and conditioning improves it by almost 70%!
In the webinar, we showed a video of a patient with frozen shoulder. Specifically, how did her range of motion looked when she was awake compared to when she was under general anesthesia. The results will shock you! I’ll leave you to check that out in the webinar. But from there, it should be clear why stretching is not going to get rid of your tightness or your lack of flexibility or mobility.
Exercise is not just for the physical bits
We shared in the previous blog post that exercise for chronic pain is not just for your body but also for your brain. Many people, clinicians and therapists alike, conflate exercise for recovery with exercise for fitness. Well, no. They are not the same!
If your recovery plan is to make yourself stronger, more flexibility, more mobile, etc, I am sorry to tell you that it’s not going work. These are fitness-based goals. They are not recovery-based goals.
The purpose of exercise-for-recovery is clear. It is to get of your pain and your injury!
(Yes, it’s true exercising can hurt in the short-term but we looking at long-term outcomes here.)
No, we are not saying that you won’t feel better if you are stronger. We are saying that being stronger-alone is not going to fully resolve your pain. If strength alone was enough, then strong people should never have pain or never get injured.
We know that is not true. Strong people do get injured and strong people can experience persistent pain!
We don’t have all the answers!
In the webinar, we also talked about the cup analogy. The cup analogy talks about what contributes to your pain experience. It also alludes to what you can do to reduce your pain experiences. This was something the participant could start reflecting on.
He didn’t.
As human beings, we like people to tell us exactly what to do. We also expect them to be right. Unfortunately, recovery is not so cut and dry. If it was so simple, cookie cutter approaches to recovery should yield excellent recovery outcomes.
But we know cookie cutter approaches don’t work.
Even when working with our clients, we do a series of stress testing to see how they respond. Based on their own response, we decide what is the best next step forward. This is what a personalised pain solution look like.
The problem is not the knowledge
His problem was in the application. If you don’t know how to apply knowledge to your own recovery, get professional help! This is what we are here for. And yes, professional help is not free.
We are all subject matter experts in our own field. None of us, absolutely none of us, are subject matter experts in all fields.
You didn’t build the house you are living in. Someone was paid to build it. You didn’t build the device you are currently using to read my blog post. Someone was paid to build it.
If you want good results, you will need to consult with an expert in musculoskeletal conditions. For reasons that should be clear now, professional help comes with a fee.
Having said that, we know many people are reading our blogs with the intent to drive their own recovery. We 100% respect and encourage that. If that’s what you are doing, you should clearly keep in mind that knowledge acquisition alone does not translate to change.
Change only occurs if you, well, change something. There must be an element of application! At the end of the day, what you get out of the 50-minute webinar will be how much you can apply to your own recovery!
Enough said, you can access the webinar for free here. And we promise you will learn something you don’t know before.
