Displaying items by tag: Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is pain that persists for weeks, months or even years. It can range from an dull annoyance to an overwhelming experience that impedes daily tasks and can even force people to miss work or family functions. Chronic pain can cause people to lose their appetite and experience exhaustion with the least bit of physical activity. For some, these experiences are episodic that can last for a day or two or even a few months and then seemingly disappear. This can make it difficult to diagnose and it is why it is some important for us to understand your history to develop an effective strategy for dissolution.

One of most well known sources of chronic pain is fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep and/or memory impairment and mood disorders. A lessor known but fairly common condition is Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS) which is genetic in origin and can often present symptoms that include chronic pain similar to fibromyalgia. It is not uncommon for people with chronic pain straddle the line of many conditions, including fibromyalgia, CFS (Chronic Fatigue syndrome) and EDS, and often receive little support for a productive plan to reduce this experience in their everyday lives.

Many people suffer from chronic pain in the absence of any notable past injury or evidence of illness, which can make it hard to find a resource to definitively offer a viable solution. With so many different approaches to treating chronic pain, finding a clear diagnosis from which to develop an effective treatment plan can often be confusing or frustrating. At Everspring Health, we immediately seek to reduce the stress of understanding your pain and begin treating your chronic pain right away. Our clients most often have a progressive experience where we are able to relieve at least some of the pain short-term while working on complete solutions in the long-term. One of the challenges of chronic pain is that often the condition has developed over years, even if symptoms may have only just begun, and it can take time for us to unwind all of the influential factors to provide long-term results.

We begin by looking at your history with pain: where it came from, what it feels like, if it changes based on movement, rest, digestion, varying temperatures, seasons, or times of day. We want to know everything we can about your experience in order to develop a treatment strategy that will work for you, specifically. Acupuncture and massage can be used to relax muscles and down regulate receptors to relieve pain, as well as positional release and other physical exercises as needed. We fully examine lifestyle habits (stress, diet, and sleep) and use our observations to improve your body’s ability to combat pain. If you have a current course of treatment – like physical therapy or surgery – we’ll work with you and your doctors to provide the best relief possible. This investment in yourself is worth it, and our co-op model makes it affordable and accessible.

Chronic fatigue is a syndrome characterized by extreme fatigue that is generally not linked to another underlying medical condition. The fatigue tends to get worse with physical or mental demands and is often not improved even with sufficient rest. Symptoms often include challenges sleeping, chronic pain, foggy head and digestive disorders. The CDC estimates that 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from CFS and about 90 percent of people with CFS have not been diagnosed.

There are three manifestations of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that one might see discussed.

• 1. Chronic fatigue - Generally as described above where the key factor is fatigue not linked with other known conditions. Causal influence is often labeled as chronic unpredictable stress from long-term overwork without the proper recovery and/or nutrition.
• 2. Chronic fatigue immunodeficiency syndrome - Often as described above but usually involves an experience where one gets sick regularly often after a more demanding illness (mono, Lyme, COVID, etc). This pattern may also occur while a latent pathogen is still present, so differentiation is important to improving long-term results.
• 3. Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) - This version of chronic fatigue syndrome (i.e. ME/CFS) is often the most demanding experience related to this category. It tends to be a long-term illness that can affect many body systems.

Chronic fatigue as a syndrome cannot be diagnosed by a single test and in many cases it is a diagnosis arrived at by ruling out all other possibilities. Often chronic fatigue is experienced in association with many other symptoms which furthers the effort to rule out other diseases or instigating conditions. Unfortunately, this also complicates progress as the individual is going untreated as the diagnostics continue.

The standard of care for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome focuses on symptom relief, whereas at Everspring Health our integrative strategy focuses on peeling back the layers of the root influences of your chronic fatigue to sufficiently dissolve the issue. Our treatment strategy goes beyond management of symptoms; we develop an Foundational Care program including nutrition, exercise, manual therapy (acupuncture, massage, etc) to provide you with a productive, progressive long-term solution. We start by understanding your past and current health history, in order to narrow down the primary influential factors. The benefits of Everspring Health’s approach is that most often something can be done to pursue a level of normal of function while diagnostics continue to rule out any other issues that may need to be addressed. One does not have to wait and see for us to support recovery.

The challenges one should understand when successfully addressing chronic fatigue is that progress may be slow and sporadic until certain benchmarks of time are met using consistent therapy throughout that time. One should be prepared to engage and invest in a program for at least 90 days so that enough progress can be made and then understood to create a lifestyle that can further the program and ideally dissolve the condition while seeking to prevent it from returning.

Back pain is the leading cause of workplace disability worldwide and one of the most common issues we deal with here at Everspring Health. From repetitive stress injuries to sprains and strains* to poor posture to back pain with unknown causes, we see it all. So, when you come in to see us we begin by looking at your history with back pain and all possible influential factors: where it came from, what it feels like, if it changes based on varying activities, body movements, temperatures, seasons, or times of day.

We want to know everything we can about your experience in order to develop a treatment strategy that will work for you, specifically. Acupuncture and massage are used to help relieve as much of the immediate pain as possible and begin the normalization the muscle tissue. We use therapeutic methods like trigger point release, positional release and physical exercises to seek to correct the impeded functional range and retrain the tissue. Our integrative approach partners chiropractic and physical therapy as a part of an effective treatment program. We fully examine lifestyle habits stress, diet, sleep, posture and use further observations to improve your body’s ability move through range of motion to ideally alleviate pain permanently. If you have a current course of treatment – like chiropractic, physical therapy or surgery – we’ll work with your doctors to provide the best relief possible.

*The difference between a sprain and a strain is that a sprain injures the bands of tissue that connect two bones together, while a strain involves an injury to a muscle or to the tendon that attaches a muscle to a bone.