Chronic Pain and Disability

Many people are living with chronic pain. The term ‘chronic’ in medicine does not mean ‘very bad’, it means long-term. In fact, the pain levels do not need to be very high to cause major disruption to somebody’s life. A low-level pain which does not abate can significantly affect a person’s life, how they interact with people, their career, and their state of mind.

Many people we meet who suffer from chronic pain have been on a journey to find answers and we are just another stop on that journey. People are looking for answers as to what is causing the pain, why is it there, how did it happen? Most of the time there are no answers to these questions.

At SportsPlus Physiotherapy we are trained to help people understand their pain rather than cure it. When people understand pain, they learn to control it and it stops controlling them. They may still have pain but through learning how they can influence it, manage it and rationalise it’s presence they can regain quality of life and remove huge amount of stress and worry from their day to day.

We find that many people who live with chronic pain develop treatment dependency where they feel they must have a certain treatment or attend a certain clinician at regular intervals in order to function. At SportsPlus Physiotherapy we try to break that treatment dependency and show people that through coping strategies, exercise, education and understanding they can ‘treat’ themselves and become self-sufficient. It is a slow and very individual process and does not work for everyone. Integral to it is establishing a working relationship between the physiotherapist and the patient. The physiotherapist needs to understand the patient, their past, their beliefs, and attitudes. The patient, for their part, needs to develop a trust and a respect for their physiotherapist and embrace the process with an open mind. This is difficult but our training gives us the skills to do this in an effective and empathetic manner.

If you would like to learn more about our approach to chronic pain or if you have any questions, please contact us at SportsPlus Physiotherapy on 067 42837 or via e-mail on info@sportsplus.ie.