Whether you’re super involved in sports, a weekend warrior, you have physical job, or it’s a chronic overuse problem, injury sucks.

Injury and pain are multifaceted and there are often many areas of health that need to be addressed to help the body heal from an injury. Pain in particular can be from multiple sources, and although different individuals may present similarly, their pain may have totally different causes. Healing from injury or pain is equally as multifaceted. From nutrition to gut health, hormones to the immune system, a whole body optimization approach is going to be more effective. If your body doesn’t have the building blocks to heal or has obstacles to healing, it’s going to take forever or possibly never heal at all! Find out which systems are affecting your ability to heal and learn what your best options are for treatment!

Common systems involved that should be addressed with any chronic pain issue:

  • Hormonal imbalance
  • Nutritional deficiencies
  • Movement dysfunction
  • Gut and microbiome dysfunction
  • Autoimmune disease
  • Systemic inflammation
  • Environmental toxin exposure

To adequately treat the any pain, including ligament and tendon dysfunction and injury, the reason the damage and pain happened in the first place has to be treated. That’s why it’s important to assess each individual as a whole to make sure both the root cause and the symptoms are addressed for this person and this injury.

Address Tissue Damage

Ligaments, tendons, and joints are avascular tissue that often have a hard time healing. When they are damaged, they create instability that the muscles often end up making up for. This results in tight muscles that are unresponsive to usual treatment.

Regenerative Injection Therapies (RIT) helps bring healing cells from the immune system to the place of injury, stimulating healing and the generation of new collagen tissue.

Treat the Nerves

The nervous system can contribute to pain and injury from cutaneous nerves, in the periosteum or from the central nervous system (the brain and spine). This includes addressing the balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which can have a large role in the perception of pain.
Many therapies including manual therapies, injections, and herbs can help reduce nervous sources of pain.

Address Movement

An ultimate why of most injuries is movement dysfunction. This could mean lack of movement, a lack of movement variety, or moving in a dysfunctional way.
Moving poorly over time can create misalignment of tissue, poor nervous control of the body, and tissue damage. No matter how you address current tissue damage, movement has to be a part of the treatment plan to improve treatment outcomes and prevent recurrence of the pain and injury.

What about Imaging?

Something I am constantly saying to patients is “all data is good data.” By that I mean the more puzzle pieces I have, the better overall picture I can get. The better the big picture, the better treatments we can pick.

Imaging, including x-rays, ultrasound, and MRI are important, because it tells us where large tears in tissues are. But it isn’t everything, and I don’t 100% need them in all cases. If we have them, I’m not going to rely on only them. Pain and dysfunction can come from inflammation, nerve damage, or the tendon or ligament being lax, frayed, or weak. These types of pathologies are not likely to show up on imaging, so it’s important to treat the whole picture of pain and what comes up as an issue on the assessment, and not just what shows up on imaging reports.

What I find equally, if not more, important than imaging is blood work and labs. This can give us clues about if the area of pain is getting the nutrients and oxygen and anti-oxidants it needs in order to heal. Hormones and the immune system can play a huge part in tissue, nerve, and joint dysfunction, as well as pain perception. So I love having imaging, but I love having labs even more. This includes past labs and in the first visit I will suggest any labs that would be important to obtain in the future.

In order to maximize treatment benefit, the first appointment includes a thorough history assessment including orthopedic tests. This is to identify the nature of the injury, but also underlying causes including movement dysfunction and systemic imbalances. A new patient initial appointment is around 90 minutes and involves some baseline treatments as well as a future plan.

Treatment plans often include several steps to address more than one system or underlying cause, so in the first appointment we will address the initial treatment step or steps, and create a plan on how to proceed in the future. It’s also super important to consider patient factors like finances, time, and how much change you can take at once. If you want to go at max speed or one baby step at a time, that is totally possible! We will discuss all of our options and create a plan that works for you!

The period of time between treatments will vary from patient to patient and depends on the injury and the type of treatment involved.

To adequately treat the any pain, including ligament and tendon dysfunction and injury, the reason the damage and pain happened in the first place has to be treated. That’s why it’s important to assess each individual as a whole to make sure both the root cause and the symptoms are addressed for this person and this injury.

Want to learn if naturopathic pain therapies might be right for you? I offer free 15 minute meet and greets to learn more about me and naturopathic medicine. Click the links below to schedule your meet and greet now!