We are frequently asked questions concerning exercise and how it applies to both the young and old. There are a lot of variables that must be determined before answering these questions, such as:

A) Is it a child or a junior?

B) Is it someone who is injured or recovering from surgery?

C) Is it someone looking to lose weight; or

D) Is it someone who is elderly and looking to regain strength?

The post SpineFit Radio – Exercise Plays an Important Role for People of all Ages appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – Exercise Plays an Important Role for People of all Ages appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

I am a big fan of establishing mobility first and I frequently talk to patients about the importance of re-establishing motion through the use of adjustments and manipulation of joints and soft tissues. After furthering my training, and after much research, my understanding is much clearer concerning movement patterns related to mobility. Specifically, we need to be able to perform some basic motor patterns or activities in daily life.

The post SpineFit Radio – The Importance of Flexibility and Mobility appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – The Importance of Flexibility and Mobility appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

It is a fact that 50 to 70% of the population today will experience some neck pain in their lives. Many of these problems are experienced in the workplace which affects employee time off, and because of this, large amounts of money are allocated for research and treatment to manage or heal people who are suffering. There are two major reasons neck pain occurs, those being one, lack of exercise; and two, environmental effects on posture in the workplace.

The post SpineFit Radio – Understanding and Treating Cervical Neck Pain appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – Understanding and Treating Cervical Neck Pain appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

One of the most common causes of low back pain is Sciatica. Sciatica involves irritation to the large nerve that runs down the back of your leg into your foot. The Sciatic nerve consists of multiple nerves that exit through the lumbar spine, all which form a large nerve that extends down through the buttocks, then down the back of the leg and into the foot. Irritation to this nerve can result in lower extremity or leg pain, as well as numbness and tingling.

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The post SpineFit Radio – Managing Sciatica through Chiropractic Treatment appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – Managing Sciatica through Chiropractic Treatment appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

Headaches can be debilitating in nature and determining whether headaches are neurological or vascular can take some time; however, people who suffer from repeated headaches should seek a diagnosis and a treatment plan. Consultation with your physician can involve MRI’s and CT scans, and sometimes even after these are performed, diagnosis can be difficult.

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The post SpineFit Radio – Help for Chronic Headache Sufferers appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – Help for Chronic Headache Sufferers appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

Low back pain is one of the topmost reasons people visit their physicians and chiropractors, and studies have shown there are roughly four or five common predictors of low back pain. In order to diagnose the actual pain triggers, we perform examinations as well as send patients for MRI’s and X-rays because a good diagnosis is essential in prescribing a plan for wellness.

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The post SpineFit Radio – Causes & Treatments Concerning Low Back Pain appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post SpineFit Radio – Causes & Treatments Concerning Low Back Pain appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

It’s the time of year when people start thinking about getting off to a fresh start with their health and fitness goals. Tulsa Spine and Rehab’s certified Fitness Instructor, Bree Robinson, has some important pointers to help people wishing to get the New Year off to a good start.

First of all, find activities that you enjoy.

Waking up extra early in the morning or taking time after a long day of work is very difficult to sustain long-term. When picking a fitness regimen, it helps to look for enjoyable activities that are tailored to your preferences. Whether you prefer boxing classes, boot camp classes, or yoga, everybody can find an exercise that is fun and fulfilling. Try different things and experiment to see what’s out there. You never know, you might end up liking something that you might have never even given a chance.

Personal trainers can keep their clients motivated, especially when it feels like a week has gone by without immediately visible results.

For people who tend to prefer a group setting, one option is to find a class and invite friends to join in. For those who prefer one-on-one interaction, a good personal trainer can be very helpful at guiding through exercises to ensure proper form and prevent injuries from occurring. Personal trainers are also a good choice for people who would like an external monitor of their progress and someone to be accountable to. Personal trainers can keep their clients motivated, especially when it feels like a week has gone by without immediately visible results.

Know your limits.

People who haven’t worked out in a while can have a hard time finding their limits. This is the ideal person who would benefit the most from having a personal trainer, at least for a couple of sessions. Many times someone trying to improve their health will walk into a gym after a long hiatus and end up feeling extremely intimidated. It can be hard to know exactly where to start and even how to use the equipment, since it has changed so much over time. Personal trainers will help their clients to get set up on the right track with clear goals and important knowledge. Once their clients are set on the right path to be safe, comfortable, and confident in the gym, they will be able to go at it alone.

Of course, it’s a good idea to do some research before hiring a personal trainer to make sure that they have a solid background. Recommendations and reviews from friends can be extremely useful in this case. By finding an experienced, knowledgable personal trainer to help you get started, you will know exactly what your limits are instead of experimenting on your body with potentially dangerous results.

Focus on the three key components to fitness: Diet, strength/weight training, and cardio.

Attention must be paid to all three of these things equally in order to be as healthy as possible and in order to turn fitness into a lifestyle. In terms of diet, the most successful strategy is to start small. Don’t try to completely throw your world for a loop and change everything all at once. Instead, maybe start by spending a week not eating anything that comes in a box. Next week, make it a goal to drink 8 glasses of water throughout the day. Make small, simple steps that can get you closer to your ideal diet. Slowly integrating these healthier habits is going to be a lot easier to keep your sanity while at the same time allowing you to effectively keep track of progress. There won’t be 50 different things that must all be kept track of at once.

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved.

Have a measurement tool to track progress. Using scale weight to track progress can often be misleading and discouraging. Instead, get a tape measure and find the important spots like your chest, arm, waist, thigh, and calf. Keep track of those changes every four to six weeks. It’s better go by inches lost and seeing a tighter, healthier body in the mirror than worrying about what the scale says.

Incorporati[...]

When you go to a doctor, physical therapist, or chiropractor, you might recall them asking you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. This is called the Visual Analog Scale, or VAS. 1 is the mildest pain, while 10 is the worst. The 1 might be visually indicated by a smiling face, and the 10 with a corresponding frowning face.

The VAS gives a provider an idea of the subjective severity of your pain. When I say ‘subjective’, I mean the perceived level of pain. A person’s pain threshold can drastically affect their subjective pain level. While the VAS can have some value, I don’t pay too much attention to it. Instead, I care most about functional improvements such as diminished muscle spasms or increased joint mobility. If a patient tells me that they can sit for 30 minutes without pain, or they can touch their toes and put their shoes on without issue, Those things will let me know that they have made some functional changes.

When you go to a doctor, physical therapist, or chiropractor, you might recall them asking you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10

Those same people may say that their pain scale has remained the same. If I notice they are experiencing objective improvements while the pain rating stays at the same level, this lets me know that what we’re doing in-clinic is working and the patient is progressing. We understand that patients tend to focus on how much pain they are feeling, but they must still recognize their functional improvements. While pain may be the initial reason that patients visit their doctor, it is an indicator that there is an underlying functional problem that must be treated.

I think that education is the key for patients to understand how they are progressing. I’ve spoken in the past about utilizing very specific metrics so we can accurately measure progress. For example, if a patient had 60 degrees right rotation when they started, and they are now able to move 86 degrees, this shows exactly how they have improved. As they functionally improve, we hope that the pain will also decrease as a consequence. At the same time, if there is no functional improvement, then we need to make some changes to our treatment plan or potentially refer them to someone else.

Because a person’s tolerance of pain varies, an 8 on my pain scale might be a 6 for you. A 10 should be debilitating pain that causes someone to be unable to get up or move around. When patients tell me that they are experiencing a 10 on the VAS, but they were able to walk into the office with no difficulty, it illustrates the psychological nature of pain and how it varies from patient to patient.

I’ve also spoken in the past about screening patients comprehensively. When a patient comes in with low back pain, we might end up noticing that they have functional limitations with their right hip. We would decide to treat their hip and spend very little time on their low back. The goal is to treat the actual cause of the pain and not just eliminate the symptom.

If you would like to learn more, contact us so we can give you a thorough exam and customize a treatment plan to address your specific needs. Call us today at (918) 743-3737.

Listen to the podcast of this post here:

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The post The Pain Scale appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

The post The Pain Scale appeared first on Tulsa Spine and Rehab » SpineCast with Sean Riley.

When a patient comes in and complains of shooting leg pain, we want to get to the bottom of it. We start by taking a medical history and examine them thoroughly so we can diagnose the problem. We start with what may be a large bucket of possible problems and work to narrow it down or empty the bucket.

The sciatica is the largest nerve in the body and it runs down your leg. It’s made up of a handful of nerves in your low back. When someone tells me they have a shooting, tingling kind of throbbing numbness down their leg, that’s the first problem I look for.

One problem in the bucket – sciatica. The sciatica is the largest nerve in the body and it runs down your leg. It’s made up of a handful of nerves in your low back. When someone tells me they have a shooting, tingling kind of throbbing numbness down their leg, that’s the first problem I look for. A common form of sciatica is a bulging or herniated disc. The disc is the spongy material between back vertebrae and when it gets damaged can protrude and create some mechanical pressure on that nerve. This also creates that radiating pain down into the leg. Conservative treatments such as physical therapy or chiropractic or possibly even interventional pain management injections can help. In a few cases, surgery is needed.

Second, it could be an orthopedic type injury. If there is tendinitis in the hamstring it can give referred pain. It could be musculature where a little neural traction in the nerve in the lower leg that is aggravated. It could be piriformis syndrome. That’s where the deep muscle below your glute muscle runs over the sciatic nerve. The muscle can become tight and reproduce shooting type symptoms into the leg as well.

We start by asking when does the pain bother you? Nine times out of ten they are going to tell me it really hurts when I sit for extended periods. There is a disc problem that irritating that nerve, prolonged sitting or sitting in that compressive load will actually aggravate the disc and irritate the nerve even more. And that will reproduce the leg pain.

It’s rarely associated with trauma. In rarer cases, there are really nasty things like tumors. But it’s typically going to be a disc problem that’s aggravated by sitting. Or it could be for flexion – a joint problem. This might increase some of the pressure in their low back, which therefore could irritate the nerve. So sitting and bending are two top activities or movements or things that we’re going to see that they are going to reproduce more of the leg pain.

Conservative treatment may include an anti inflammatory from your physician and possibly a steroid. What we’re trying to do with medication is reduce that inflammation in that disc to reduce pressure on the nerve.

Chiropractic at Tulsa Spine and Rehab is a good treatment modality. We don’t want to manipulate or move around that area where there potentially may be a disc problem but try to address other areas. Like in the thoracic spine or the mid back and below into the hips. Try to pick up some movement in those areas.

Probably one of the most effective treatments or forms of care for disc problems is physical therapy. We all need to work on core stability. The more strength and stability that we can bring around that will take a little pressure of that disc. And in turn, lessen some of the leg pain.

Tulsa Spine and Rehab’s goal when we’re treating sciatic type injuries or leg pain, we just want to become more centralized. So if a patient comes in and the pain is shooting all the way down into the foot or the calf. After a couple of weeks we can get it localized to the back of the thigh or just into the glutes. It will be much more manageable from there.

If you’re experiencing leg, you need to check in with Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Spine and Rehab.

Listen to the podcast of this post here:

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The post Shooting Leg Pain – Sciatica or Something Else? appeared first [...]

We see a lot of patients dealing with knee pain and stiffness here at Tulsa Spine and Rehab. These problems usually arise after sitting for an extended period of time or after vigorous exercise (especially running). There are quite a few effective treatments, but there are also many things people are doing that aren’t as beneficial as one would tend to think. Interestingly, there are actually several different kinds of knee stiffness. Whenever people come in to have their knees checked, we must first pinpoint the problem because it will help us determine the best treatments.

When a patient is experiencing knee stiffness, that means that there is an issue with the joint. In every joint in the body, there is a fluid filled sac that lines or surrounds the end of the two bones. The fluid should be thick and viscous, like motor oil. Along with the sac is cartilage that lines the ends of the bones. Cartilage acts like a bumper—its job is to distribute load over a large area whenever pressure is applied to the joint. When the cartilage in the knee gets soft or rough, there will be a response in the fluid in the knee. It will get more watery than it is supposed to, which leads to knee stiffness.

We see a lot of patients dealing with knee pain and stiffness here at Tulsa Spine and Rehab. These problems usually arise after sitting for an extended period of time or after vigorous exercise (especially running).

Causes

The first and probably most common situation that results in knee stiffness is spending prolonged periods sitting down at a desk. After getting up and walking around, it may take 15 to 20 steps before you notice the knee gets lubricated and starts to feel better. The other kind of situation that results in knee stiffness is when people exercise too hard (walking or running, for example) or they have been standing for an extended period of time. Afterwards, they will end up with a stiff, achey knee that is often swollen for two to three days.

Should I get my knee stiffness checked?

If you experience stiffness without pain that goes away after a short time, it is still something that must be paid attention to. This means that you are starting to experience some changes within the joint itself. If knee stiffness and pain lasts for multiple days, you definitely need to get some help, because that will likely lead to osteoarthritis over time. More severe procedures such as arthroscopy can become necessary, and this is completely avoidable if it is addressed early.

Aren’t my knee issues just a natural part of aging?

These ailments are not just a result of aging. It is similar to the old wive’s tale where a person says that they can feel the weather coming in because of their knee. While there may be some truth to that, there are also 18-year-olds with the same complaints. Knee damage could be the result of sports, having a child, or working at an office. While there are more instances of knee issues in older people, it is not something to blow off. There are treatments and solutions available to help with knee issues no matter what age the patient is.

What treatments are available?

At Tulsa Spine and Rehab, we have different disciplines such as physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, yoga, or personal training as some treatment options. One of the biggest mistakes that is often made is doing muscular type training. When people experience knee injuries, they might think they need to do activities like weight lifting or other classic gym exercises. The problem is, the joint is sensitive to pressure. Overloading will make the problem worse.

Quitting exercise entirely is also a mistake. Since exercise might have caused the knee to hurt to begin with, people will often decide to rest completely in order to heal. Instead, we have special tools such as the AlterG and Total Gym. The joint needs low-load, highly repetitive motion. That means that we want to put light pressure through the joint and do thousands[...]