Do you have neck or shoulder pain? Have you ever been to your doctor looking for relief only to be told that your pain is all in your head? There may be some truth to this but not in the way you might think. FYZICAL in Oklahoma City is making use of the latest in pain neuroscience education and orthopedic physical therapy to help relieve chronic pain.
Does Pain Get Worse with Stress?
Do you ever notice your pain gets worse when your stress levels increase? Do you ever end up in the cycle of pain, where you have pain, get anxious about it, the pain gets worse and your stress and anxiety get worse too? If so, you are not alone.
A recent study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research found a strong correlation between the presence of chronic neck and shoulder pain and high stress and anxiety levels.1 Neck and shoulder pain often go hand in hand, and the study demonstrates the effect that high stress levels have on chronic neck and shoulder pain. If experiencing chronic neck and shoulder pain is a problem you are dealing with on a consistent basis, you may want to evaluate your stress levels.
There is an activity you can perform to rate how much stress and pain you experience on a daily basis. For one to two weeks, rate your personal stress level on a scale of 0 (No Stress) to 10 (Inability to focus on daily activities) and rate your neck and shoulder pain on a scale of 0 (No Pain) to 10 (Going to the hospital). Then determine whether you see a correlation. When your stress is high, is your pain also high? (Note that pain and stress levels don’t need to be equivalent, they are just likely to both be high or both be low together.)
What Can I do About Pain?
You may already know that your stress levels contribute to your pain; if that’s the case, then where do you begin to fix it? Here are some homeopathic remedies to reduce stress and anxiety levels:
- Focused relaxation 10 minutes a day; including diaphragmatic breathing
- Meditative stretching; like yoga
- Drink camomile tea and remove any screen time 30 minutes before bedtime
- Get adequate sleep (adults need an average of 6-8 hours)
- Write in a journal or find an outlet to alleviate the stress
- Reduce caffeine intake from coffee, soda, tea and energy drinks
- Reduce sugar and starchy carbohydrate intake (both have been linked to increased levels of anxiety and depression)
- Eat a diet rich in green leafy vegetables, colorful fruits, and lean sources of protein
- Make a list the stress factors in your life and work on a plan to reduce or eliminate them
- Set up an appointment with your physical therapist.
Many patients come to physical therapy with complaints of a long history of neck pain. We aren’t the always the first call, but physical therapy could be your last call. Physical therapists treat a variety of musculoskeletal concerns including pain. Orthopedic physical therapy is perfect to help reduce your chronic neck and shoulder pain.
What Happens During Physical Therapy?
If you’ve never been to physical therapy, we understand you might have heard some crazy rumors. Let me tell you, our goal is to get you out of pain. We want you to function at your best. When it comes to pain, we are likely to use manual therapy. Manual therapy is like a focused massage. The PT is going to help release the tension in the muscles of the shoulder and cervical spine that could be contributing to your pain. Decreasing tight tissues, releasing trigger points, and re-educating your postural muscles to work together, we can reduce the strain in your neck and shoulders. In addition to addressing soft tissues, we will perform an evaluation that will allow us to identify postural deviations and/or weak points in your spine that are contributing to your symptoms. These deficits result in movement impairments, and further the cycle of pain, tightness and dysfunction. By addressing these impairments we can work with you to manually re-educate the muscles that are not working properly and reduce muscles that are limited in their mobility.
There is enough stress to worry about. Let the PTs here at FYZICAL help you to get back to life and reaching your goals. By developing a plan that works best for you, we can get you functioning at your best. We will provide a home exercise program to maintain the gains made with treatment and keep the dysfunction from coming back. Our goal is to teach you these techniques so that you can perform your daily activities without your neck and shoulder pain being a factor that limits your activity level. Give us a call to get you back to where you can LOVE YOUR LIFE ™ .