Easing pain using your brain is easier than you think. Here’s how… Nerves are really efficient at delivering pain messages to the brain and telling us what we need to pay attention to. But can we turn off the nerves once we’ve listened to the message? No, not entirely, but we can turn down the…
For most people, chiropractic treatment makes their pain improve almost immediately. But this isn’t guaranteed to be the case. There’s nothing more frustrating than making the first steps towards improving your back pain, and then finding you feel worse after your first treatment. This is an understandable cause of concern for chiropractic patients, but we’re…
Pain and sleep don’t mix. Pain makes it more difficult to sleep, and poor sleep makes it more likely you’ll focus on pain. So what can you do if you are getting back pain during the night? Studies show that sleep impairments are likely to contribute to pain rather than pain contributing to sleep impairments…
We’ve all heard about the benefits of good posture – how it improves everything from spinal health to energy levels, even the appearance of our facial features and our general self-esteem. When we talk about posture, what we really mean is how we are holding ourselves while standing or sitting. This sounds simple enough, but…
The clocks are going back an hour on the 30th of October, which means less daylight. Sunshine makes vitamin D in your skin. Vitamin D is essential for bone health, and it’s harder to come by during the darker winter months due to fewer hours of sunshine. The British Nutrition Foundation estimates that 49% of…
Where two or more bones meet, you have a joint. These crucial bony meeting points around the body hold us upright and protect nerves and blood vessels. The spine has 33 pairs of nerves which, in the average adult, are protected by 24 vertebrae (we’re born with 33, but the ones at the base of…
Fibromyalgia turns a whisper of pain into a scream. It is a condition caused by the amplification of pain by the nervous system. Light stimuli become painful and average levels of pain are experienced as much more severe. The brain’s normal processing of pain becomes impaired, leading to intense discomfort, fatigue, anxiety and many associated…
It’s Stoptober again – and you probably already know many reasons to quit tobacco and become a non-smoker. We hardly need tell you again about cancer, strokes and heart disease. But did you know that smoking affects the musculoskeletal system too? It increases the risk of developing conditions in joints and bones and makes recovery…
When suffering from back pain, it’s not surprising if all you want to do is rest. However, low-impact exercise is actually one of the best things you can do to improve your symptoms. Often high-impact exercising can be too painful if you’re suffering from spinal issues, so walking is a great option to make sure…
The term arthritis covers many joint conditions. The symptoms are usually stiffness, reduced mobility and often (but not always) pain. Arthritis often appears after a long period of dysfunction and it can be a result of injury, wear and tear, autoimmune disorders or genetic predisposition. Osteoarthritis is the commonest type of arthritis and is almost…
