A colleague of mine Gage Permar, DPT recently posted an excellent blog post about pain medication and some of the unintended consequences. Some of the statistics that he cites are truly frightening. The levels of gastrointestinal complications are especially frightening. Gage alludes to an upcoming post in which he will lay out some alternative to pain meds.
One of the points that his blog brought to mind is that there are reasons for your pain. Consistently overriding our brains’ ways of signaling us may not be a good idea. This is especially true with acute pain. There may be exceptions for patients who are experiencing chronic pain but masking our body’s natural alarm system is not a good idea. Even the inflammatory processes are designed to provide injured tissues with what they need for healing.
From my point of view, pain can be managed with much more conservative interventions without the side effects. Some of the best alternative ways to manage your pain include the following.
1: Manual therapy: Manual therapy includes massage, joint mobilizations and spinal manipulations. All of these have been shown to decrease pain.
2: Exercise: General exercise as well as specific exercises are excellent pain managing tools.
3: Pain management techniques: Coping strategies play a big role in managing your pain. Often education about a patient’s condition is extremely beneficial to give patients some control of their situation.
The great news is that all of these interventions are available to you. In fact, all of these interventions are available at Siskiyou PT.
