Understanding Pain

Many of our athletes deal with pain on a daily/weekly basis.  Some athletes can endure more pain than their counterparts.

But what exactly is pain?

Pain is a signal from an area of the body to the brain that something has varied from its normal position, chemistry, electrical valance, structure, internal pathology or external damage.

Pain comes in a variety of explanations…aches, pain, burning, cooling, electrical, constant, on-and-off, sharp, and weak. The key is to understand what is pain which is damage and what is discomfort which can come from weakness.

Once you’ve damaged an area, let’s say a sprained ankle, after the initial damage has been worked on and cleared up the patient may continue to experience some type of pain.  Many times this self described pain is more of a weakness of that area that hasn’t completely strengthened.  The weak tissue will show signs of pain when in fact the “damage” of that area has healed now the signals that are being sent to the brain are more of a signal of weakness.

The more you strengthen the less you’re going to feel any pain in that area.

We use a numeric scale for our athletes to describe their pain.  On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing no pain at all we ask the patient to rate their pain.  Ten pain is if I took a hammer and smashed your hands as hard as I could.

This will give me at least an indication of where the patient is on the scale and what type of damage I’m dealing with.

Every day we have our patients tell us where there pain is for that day.  This gives us a indication day by day if they are getting better to let us know if the treatment that I’m using is the correct one.

When you use aspirin or other over the counter medication you’re essentially just “masking” the pain.  The key to ending pain relief is getting to the problem that is causing the pain.  I call that the “pain generator” – which is the area that is causing the pain.   Many time the pain generator has nothing to do with the actual site of your pain.

Many time pain can be referred from other areas of your body.  So if you continue to treat the site of pain and the pain is coming from some where else you will never find relief.  You can read more about this at my web site www.ConwayClinic.com

Injuries on the Rise

I’ve been preaching for years that we will see a death in Division I or college football in prime time.  The reason I say this is that the game is getting faster each year, the players are getting bigger each year and physics dictates that when an object is in motion it tends to stay in motion…regardless of the end point.

With that said, the game, the equipment and the training must grow together or there will be a problem…epically in football. 

The fact of the matter is this…players are training to generate force but they are not training to properly absorb the force.  It reduce injury, the body must properly be able to absorb force.  It’s a simple process that most if not all trainers do not understand. 

 Most players are looking to get bigger – stronger – faster, with out any regard to safety.  If you look at the NFL, NBA and many other professional teams you will see that injuries are on the rise.  It would stand to reason that if the present day training is getting better than the injuries would be getting less.

It quite the opposite and it seems to be getting worse.  Here is an excerpt of an article that was written in OT Magazine about over use injuries.  It’s not just me noticing that injuries are on the rise.

THE OVERTRAINING SYNDROME

It was past the midway point of the 2006-07 NBA season when New York Knicks broadcaster Walt Frazier wondered on the air why there seemed to be an usually high number of injuries — especially stress-related ailments like muscle pulls, fractures, sprained ankles and tendonitis. “You know,” said the Hall of Fame guard, “all these injuries may be caused by players training too much.”

Frazier’s thought was a provocative one, especially since the conventional wisdom says that professional athletes are in the best shape than ever in the history of sports. The strength-training and aerobics equipment is high-tech, the stretching techniques can target the smallest muscles and the physical trainers are exercise experts. And with million-dollar, long-term contracts as the motivation, many pro athletes are training year round (as OT chronicled in our Jan/Feb 2007 “Training Room” department) and some even spend time pumping and cycling right after games……

In future articles I will explain a new type of thought pertaining to training high level (and regular as well) athletes to prevent injury and to improve performance.

How & When To Use Ice

Ice is a great treatment for most type of sports injuries.  If used correctly it can really help to reduce swelling, pain relief and help to restore motion.

The easiest way to use ice is to get a zip long bag and fill it with ice.  The put it on the affected area…pretty easy.

Now here’s the trick…in 20 minutes get the ice off.  After 20 minutes there is evidence that after this time period the ice can begin to mimick heat.  Why is this bad?  Well when you injure an area the typical responce by the body is to flood the area with swelling.

The key is to remove as much of the swelling as quick as possible.  Swelling brings in fibrotic (scar) tissue to this injured area and the quicker that you can reduce the swelling the less scar tissue will form.

So for sprains, strains….ice.  20 minutes on and then wait about an hour before you can reapply the ice again.

If you follow this protocol you can continue to use the ice for as long as you feel that this method is helping.