PAIN CARE PHYSIOTHERAPY
Holistic · Integrative · Neuroplasticity
“The lived experience of pain is a journey through limitations and vulnerabilities as well as strengths and potential.”
Much more than standard physiotherapy, individual pain and stress coaching with Nic, a Titled Pain Physiotherapist with the Australian Physiotherapy Association and Australian College of Physiotherapists, offers a holistic, socio-psycho-biological tool-belt full of strategies, skills, practices, and knowledge, to help you move forward from pain and stress with confidence and start living life again.
Living with pain can be an overwhelming constant. Too often, pain dominates our life, and we lose our sense of self, knowing ourselves only from our pain and how it affects us day by day. The road of recovery is the road of ‘life’. By choosing ‘life’, you will discover a new sense of agency and control that allows you to move forward from pain and start living by your values toward a rich and rewarding future.
The key to success is when we learn the tools to befriend our nervous system and our body, which for many has been an untrustworthy and often-times scary place to dwell. Interestingly, in my years of working with persisting pain, I have come to understand that by coming toward the body, even when what we meet is painful, we are able to increase our confidence and decrease our fear. And fear feeds pain. By replacing unskilful, unconscious protective, and defensive patterns with more skillful ways of being, we can start reclaiming our bodies, and our emotions, and reclaim movement and function. We achieve this together with a tailored, individualised plan applying the latest pain science and evidence-based practice.
“All mind patternings are expressed in movement, through the body. And all physically moving patterns have a mind”
What to expect
an empathic, compassionate encounter, one of mutual trust and respect
with careful listening and a thorough assessment of your specific problems, we will come to a diagnosis of your pain condition
together, we will discover and address the factors that are keeping you stuck and forming barriers to your progress
together we will create an individualised plan toward recovery that grows from your goals and values
a positive approach that comes from a deep clinical knowledge of the Mindbody system, and reflects current-day scientific evidence, I like to call it holistic, integrative, neuroplasticity
when our work is finished, you will not only feel better physically, but you will have a greater understanding of how your body and mind can work together to sustain a healthy, pain-free life
Some examples of pain care treatment approaches:
Making sense of pain - the first part of moving forward from pain is understanding what pain is and is not. Pain education is important because your understanding of pain might be stopping you from doing the things necessary for recovery. Pain indeed affects everything, but the upside of this is that everything affects pain! Understanding pain and aspects of your life that maintain your pain, offers great hope, as it opens up a whole pathway of new treatment approaches, allowing you to regain control of your life
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) - is an evidence-based system of techniques that retrains the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, subsequently breaking the pain/threat cycle. This Mindbody approach is neuroplasticity in action and if assessed to be appropriate for you, can offer complete resolution of your symptoms. Nicole is a certified Pain Reprocessing Therapy specialist via Alan Gordon’s Pain Reprocessing Therapy Center, USA
Somatic Tracking - is a combined educative and mindfulness approach to rewire the software (nervous system and brain, immune and endocrine system) out of fear and pain. It is a part of PRT mentioned above
Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) - developed by Dr. Howard Schubiner and Mark Lumley and drawn from the work of Dr. Habib Davanloo’s Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), EAET is a way to guide individuals toward dealing with emotional hurts that can be linked to physical symptoms in the body including anxiety, pain, and fatigue, by using memory reconsolidating techniques
Cognitive Functional Therapy (CFT) - involves the assessment and subsequent unpicking of over-adaptive, protective movement patterns that can develop over the months and years of living with pain. Through a series of graded exercises using the principle of ‘exposure’, this approach targets fear of movement and cultivates the foundation for feeling safe in your body
Exercise for pain, body, and mind - Current exercise guidelines fail to include the new research on exercise for mental health. Exercise is proven to be helpful (often to a greater degree than anti-depressant medications) for chronic pain, depression, and anxiety as well as other chronic conditions including diabetes and heart disease. You may be pleased to learn that the dosage and approach to exercise to improve pain and mental health are less demanding than the recommendations in our national guidelines for physical health alone. If you fear exercise due to the risk of experiencing increased pain or increased symptoms of anxiety, you are in good hands here! Let’s establish an achievable and graded exposure approach to progressively build up your tolerance and confidence for movement-based approaches that you enjoy and can sustain in your life
Mindfulness and compassion training - The practice of mindfulness meditation offers a way of relating differently to your body and your pain by reducing the emotional aspects or the distress of pain. Find out a little more here
Brain training strategies - modern neuroscience has provided us with new ways of approaching pain through our understanding of the brain when we are in pain. We can target the adaptations and changes that occur in ongoing pain states by using particular types of training. For example, visualisation and imagery, desensitisation, proprioceptive and tactile discrimination training and memory reconsolidation techniques
Sensorimotor retraining – is a specific type of brain training strategy. It provides bodies and brains with a nutritious movement diet which assists brain regions to better ‘listen’ to the painful body part and help reorganise smudged brain regions. It involves specific exercises to target local and regional biomechanical effects of pain and improve neuromuscular activation and coordination
Pacing – applying principles of pain science to safely, systematically, and gradually re-engage with valued activities