Dr. Dean C. Bellavia

1-716-834-5857

BioEngineering@twc.com

Managing your Pain


Thursday, 16 June 2016 10:25
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Do you suffer from chronic lower back pain?  Do you suffer from occasional or chronic hip pain?  Or are there other pains (i.e., shoulder, leg, foot, etc.)?  Do you want to get rid of or ease that pain?  If so, maybe this pearl can help.

 

We all suffer from pain in our lives, especially as we get older—and being a dentist doesn’t help; quite the opposite.  Non-traumatic pain (injury, etc.) comes from muscles and bone joints.  Pain can come from over-use of some muscles and under-use of others, throwing your entire musculo-skeletal system out of balance.

 

When we over-use a muscle it becomes fatigued and creates “trigger points”.  A trigger point is a small part of the muscle that is permanently contracted until resolved.  This contraction pulls on the tendons attached to that muscle.  The tendon pulls on the bones it is attached to, pulling the joint out of its natural position and causing your pain.  If these trigger points are not resolved the contraction can cause joint damage (as is evident in the knees), which leads to chronic pain.

 

The most common pain for dentists is back and hip pain that stems from working in an unnatural twisted position.  This affects the entire spine, but mostly the lower back and hips.  At the recent AAO meeting in Orlando, I noticed that the younger dentists walked upright and the older dentists listed to one side—and the older they were the more they listed.  Many doctors I spoke to were in pain, some obvious (limping or bent over) and some not (trying to ignore their pain)—most of their pain was unnecessary.

 

Pain, even chronic debilitating pain can be resolved or avoided.  Simple daily exercises can help you avoid pain by strengthening your muscles to keep them from becoming fatigued.  Unfortunately, most people would rather live with occasional pain and not do the exercises until the pain becomes chronic.  I asked one client at the AAO meeting how his decades of chronic back pain was doing and he said that he is doing well now that he does my daily “Back Wellness Program” exercises.  Another client limped up to my booth with obvious right hip pain he had been suffering for days.  I showed him where the trigger point was and how to massage it, which relieved the pain.  His comment was “this may just be the best reason to came to this meeting”.

 

If you have chronic lower center back pain, you may want to learn simple daily exercises to avoid painful episodes—get the “Back Wellness Kit”.

If you have chronic or occasional hip, leg or foot pain, you may want to learn how to remove the trigger points that cause that pain—get the “Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, 3rd Edition”.  This workbook may just be the best reference you ever bought—it was for me!

 

You do NOT have to live with chronic or even occasional pain.  I use to have gout episodes that lasted for months, causing excruciating pain.  I now use Trigger Point Therapy at the first sign of pain and eliminate the episode altogether (I lived with it for two years before I figured it out—Trigger Point Therapy was the key).

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