Chronic pain permeates every aspect of your life, significantly impairing your day-to-day activities and diminishing your quality of life. If you suffer from chronic pain, Rainier Family Physical Therapy, PS, can help. From their beautiful facilities in Puyallup, Washington, the physical therapy experts have helped numerous patients manage, rehabilitate, and alleviate their chronic pain. To get started, schedule a visit today by calling the office or booking an appointment online.
Chronic pain is long-term pain that you can experience without any identifiable cause.
Pain is normally a useful and important tool that your nervous system uses to prevent you from injuring yourself. The purpose of sudden pain is to encourage your body to remove itself from whatever harmful situation or condition is causing it harm, protecting your body from injury.
Chronic pain, however, happens in the absence of a particular pain stimulus. When you suffer from chronic pain, your body continues to send pain signals to your brain even if there’s no injury or threat. This can impair your endurance, strength, flexibility, and mobility and make it incredibly difficult to function properly.
There many ways that chronic pain manifests. For some people, it’s persistent headaches, while for others, it’s a pain that radiates elsewhere in their body, like their lower back or joints.
Some of the symptoms that can accompany chronic pain include:
As you can see, chronic pain can affect more than your musculoskeletal system and can have a profound effect on your mood, emotions, and psychology.
In many cases, it’s unclear what exactly causes chronic pain. It usually starts with an injury, and some people think that the root of chronic pain is nerve damage that isn’t treated after an injury has healed.
Some people develop chronic pain without an instigating injury, however. In these cases, the chronic pain might be tied to an underlying health condition, like:
Whatever the cause, chronic pain can be a severe and debilitating condition.
The team at Rainier Family Physical Therapy, PS, offers a variety of rehabilitation services, but they specialize in a manual manipulation therapy called Counterstrain. The goal of Counterstrain is to identify and treat your tender points.
Tender points are areas of your musculoskeletal system that are stuck in a state of tension. They get stuck in this state as an overprotective response to a perceived threat, like an injury to your body or a diet that’s high in inflammatory foods.
Your physical therapist uses their hands to gently release these points of tension, which relaxes the spasming muscles and alleviates your pain.
Schedule your visit with Rainier Family Physical Therapy, PS, by phone or online and start treating your chronic pain today.