Other than creating a positive,
education, and warm atmosphere, I like to use metaphors to help
patients understand their condition and to decrease the perceived
threat.
I did a google plus hangout video consultation over the
weekend. The patient sought me out after
looking for help for his thoracic spine on youtube.
MDT can be done without ever laying
your hands on anyone, so it's a natural evaluation and treatment,
that requires mostly education and getting the patient to move in the
right direction to alleviate their complaints. There were a few
strikes he had against him. The first one was that his dad is one of
the most prominent radiologists in the large metropolitan area he
lives in. So he had a history of a large disc protrusion in his
lumbar spine as well as “several” disc protrusions in his
thoracic spine around the area of his pain and paraesthesia.
His complaints started 10 years ago, insidious
onset of lumbar and radiating leg pain. It occurred after he used
to fall asleep on his job almost daily in a very flexed position in
his chair. He did say he has grown up a lot since then! After seeing
the “sea of endless practitioners” he did find one thing that
helped, the Treat Your Own Back text by none other than McKenzie. He was able to centralize and abolish most of his “chronic”
lower back and radiating leg pain. He was not able to treat his
thoracic pain and paraesthesia.
Here are the education pieces I
conveyed to him regarding his “chronic disc issues for 10 years”
- when you take a large population of people off of the street with have no symptoms, up to 80% of them have positive radiological findings, some which appear to be worse than yours
- when you do not have your complaints, your MRI still shows the same findings
- much of what those findings are just the kisses of time – from David Butler
- each educational piece slowly turned on the light bulb, but it was flickering due to all the thought viruses he has heard over the years
- when he mentioned his chronic disc issues for 10 years again on the follow up my response was
- if you skinned your knee repeatedly 5-6 times over the past 10 years, do you tell people that you have a chronically skinned knee
- DING! The lightbulb really went off then
In terms of MDT findings, we were able
to produce his complaints with some cervical protrusion and they were
also easily centralized and abolished with cervical retraction with
extension. When I followed up with him then next day, he was moving
out of his apartment, but felt much more positive about his pain. His
leg pain returned, but I told him to offset the repeated lifting and
bending with hips offset pressups more often taking frequent breaks. Since then he has golfed pain free!
What are some of your favorite patient
explanations and metaphors to decrease the perceived threat?
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