Wellbeing - Persistent Musculoskeletal Pain
Wellbeing Event - Persistent Musculoskeletal Pain
Wednesday 10th March
17.30 - 19.00
Virtual Session
Professional Speaker:
Georgie Oldfield MCSP is a leading physiotherapist and UK Specialist in a pioneering approach to chronic pain that is evidence-based, educational and focuses on self-empowerment. Georgie is a clinician and author, having published her book, ‘Chronic Pain: your key to recovery’ in 2014.
Through her company, SIRPA, Georgie also developed the first training programme in this field in 2010, enabling health professionals to learn how to integrate this approach and the concept on which it is based within their own work. Georgie also speaks widely about this approach, gave a TEDx talk in 2019 and since 2015 has organised and hosted international conferences, which are held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London.
There is no evidence to demonstrate a link between pain and actual tissue damage and further evidence shows that chronic pain is due to learned neural pathways that have become sensitised. Pain is our primal brain’s protective response hence why we can experience extreme pain when over-stretching a muscle or getting too close to a hot plate because the pain is protecting us from causing actual tissue damage.
Unfortunately, despite this understanding, most treatments for chronic pain still use a physical approach aimed at addressing the pain, or the symptom, rather than the underlying cause. That is like cutting off the leaves of a dandelion - and look what happens then!
Obviously it’s important for our health to be active, to move, exercise, stretch etc. However, it’s the non-physical factors that have been found to play the major role in why pain after an injury becomes persistent. These include: stress, the presence of anxiety or depression, previous trauma (including in childhood) and fear about the pain becoming permanent.
In this talk, Georgie will talk about the pain science demonstrating why we need to use a more psychosocial approach when treating chronic/persistent pain. She will talk about why people experience pain after sitting for long periods, the impact of poor ergonomics and the relevance of findings on MRI scans, poor posture and poor core stability in relation to musculoskeletal pain, including back, neck and shoulder pain, repetitive strain injury etc.
Georgie will also briefly describe some practises that could help attendees not just ease pain they have, but for many, could prevent it in the first place.