Category: chronic pain

 

 

  1. Lumbar spinal stenois (LSS)…defined by any narrowing of the spinal canal and/or nerve root canals…In patients with severe LSS, a space reduction of 67% has been found in the spinal canal.”

 

Spinal stenosis is the narrowing of the holes of the spine. The spine has 3 holes in it in the lumbar region. Each hole carries a nerve. It could either be the nerve of the spinal cord down the middle, and larger, hole. It could be the nerve roots out of the holes on the side of the spine. Each hole needs to be big enough so that it doesn’t irritate the nerve that it allows to pass through the hole. Picture a water pipe. If you put too much stuff in the pipe it will clog up. Sometimes there are tissues that can make their way into the holes of the spine to clog the holes. When the hole is clogged, the nerves don’t have as much room to do their job (transmitting signals to and from the brain). Now take that same pipe and come back and look at it over decades. There will be sludge and stuff built up around the pipe. This is essentially creating a smaller diameter on the inside of the pipe. This smaller diameter due to sludge is also creating a smaller hole. This could happen in the spine with severe arthritis or degenerative disc issues in which the hole gets smaller. A visual is much better so maybe this will help. image for spinal stenosis

 

  1. “…estimated the incidence of LSS in Denmark to 272 per one million inhabitants per year”

 

In other words, it is not very common in Denmark.

 

  1. “…it is important to discriminate between LSS and disc generated pain since these conditions have different prognoses and the range of evidence based treatments are different, as well.”

 

The treatment between the two issues, discogenic back pain and stenotic back pain, is very different. A thorough evaluation can start to correlate symptoms with either discogenic pain or non-discogenic pain. Many patients believe that an MRI will be the answer to why they have pain, but unfortunately this isn’t so.

 

  1. “a valid and reliable clinical assessment protocol for identifying LSS would be valuable in terms of choosing relevant treatment and informing the patient about the prognosis as early as possible.”

 

This article was written in 2009. The medical profession has existed for eons. There is still not a valid way to assess a patient in order to determine spinal stenosis. There are biologically plausible ways, meaning that when I assess you, I can make an educated guess from some of the findings in the history and physical, but it is not a valid (proven) way of coming to a conclusion.

 

  1. “The high sensitivity and specificity of MRI suggests this is a good test for ruling in and out the disease.”

 

The MRI does a great job of telling us what is abnormal, but it doesn’t do a great job of telling us if the abnormal finding is causing symptoms. As seen in the link above, there are abnormal findings in a population without symptoms. We have to take the imaging findings and see if they make sense after performing a physical exam.

 

  1. “…history will provide strong clues to the presence of spinal stenosis…more than 65 years of age…prolonged history of low back pain and intermittent radiating symptoms having developed gradually…limited walking capacity…Movements or positions involving flexion e.g. sitting or stooping, will often abolish symptoms…total loss of lumbar extension range is usually found, while flexion most often is well preserved.”

 

The typical patient with lumbar spinal stenosis will notice that the ability to walk has gradually reduced over time and there is a need to sit due to back or leg pain. Sitting will typically turn down or off the symptoms rapidly. This patient will have limited motion into extension (think of looking over your head to see the stars or bending backwards while standing).

 

  1. “…stenosis from zygapophyseal joint hypertrophy, ligament thickening or other degenerative changes, it cannot be expected that physical exercise or manual treatment will create a lasting change in the degree of space reduction in the spinal canal or intervertebral foramina”

 

In the presence of physical changes to the bones, ligaments or loss of disc height, there is nothing that a PT can do to change these back to the way that they were previously. These have been described as wrinkles on the inside. If we look at your face we can start to see how much age you have based on the wrinkles in the face. This is also done on the inside in that some “degenerative” changes are normal. Wrinkles are normal; they are not symptoms of anything sinister. The same can be said for physical changes on the inside. They don’t have to be pain generators. It takes a physical exam to determine how your symptoms respond and whether or not this matches the images on an MRI or X-ray. Even then, we can’t say that movement won’t help, only that we won’t change the physical “inside wrinkles”.

 

  1. “The main purpose of this pilot study is to evaluate the validity and intertester reliability of an algorithm of physical examination tests, in relation to identifying symptomatic lumbar spinal stenosis.”

 

This is good. A pilot study is like a pilot for a t.v. show. This is done to see if additional episodes should be done. This study will conclude if additional studies on this topic should be done.   What it hopes to find is a reliable (consistent) way of determining validity (actually seeing what the test hopes to see) in testing for lumbar spinal stenosis. A test that is both reliable and valid should be able to test for spinal stenosis regardless of who is performing the test and who is measuring the test.

 

  1. “Two patients were classified as “LSS” and five patients “Not LSS”, meaning a 29% prevalence of “LSS” Intertester agreement for overall diagnostic conclusion was 100%”

 

There are so few patients that this study will likely not yield any results that are actionable. The interesting thing is that the examiners agreed 100% of the time. This is not common in the medical field to have 100% agreement on near anything.

 

  1. “…the algorithm in its present form can not be used as a screening test to rule out LSS, although it may be able to diagnose the condition.”

 

There were so few people in the study that it is hard for any clinician to put it to use in the clinic. It may be able to diagnose the condition in that it demonstrated a specificity of 1.0, which is really good.

 

 

Excerpts taken from:

 

Lengsoe L, Lyhne S, Melbye M. An algorithm for clinical identification of spinal stenosis-a pilot study of validity and intertester reliability. International J of MDT. 2009;4(2):21-28.

 

Can’t find the abstract to the study, but it is listed under the author’s CV http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/martin-melbye(ed4ee688-2d9e-4c17-b0b1-44a5b4b59ada)/publications/an-algorithm-for-clinical-identification-of-spinal-stenosis–a-pilot-study-of-validity-and-intertester-reliability(6d714ee0-d910-11de-9e3b-000ea68e967b).html

 

 

 

 

Not all back pain is back pain

“Findings such as disk height loss and disc bulges are common in individuals without low back pain.”
Disc bulges, degenerative joint disease, spinal stenosis, can all be a result of living with gravity. We have gravity acting as a compression force on us almost 16 hours a day. Anytime that there is a problem, we want to blame something or somebody. Low back pain is an enigma at times. We can draw correlations, we can come up with risk factors, we can even tell you how to treat it sometimes, but what we can’t do is tell you is exactly what causes your back pain. 
“Surprisingly, disc protrusions were associated with a lower risk of subsequent back pain. Nerve root contact and central stenosis had the largest hazard ratios on baseline imaging findings, and they were associated with incident back pain in the expected direction but not statistically significant. Self identified depression was the strongest predictor of subsequent back pain, with a greeter hazard ratio than any imaging findings.”
What should be taken from the above statistics is that mental health plays a role in pain. There are a lot of new studies that are associating catastrophizing and external locus of control with increased pain levels. Work by Nadine Foster demonstrates a screen for patients who will have a difficult time improving with therapy alone. New were books, such as the one by Annie O’Connor and Melissa Kolski (two people with whom I’ve studied at our RIC study group), goes into great detail regarding pain science. Big picture, we can not neglect the patient’s emotional well-being when attempting to treat the patient’s physical complaints.
“Our results indicate that depression is a strong predictor of who will subsequently report low back pain than baseline imaging findings.Subjects with self reported depression at baseline were 2.3 times as likely to have back pain compared with those who do not report depression.” 
There is obviously a psychosocial component to low back pain. The question is… Chicken or the egg. Is a person more likely to be depressed because they have back pain that is not improving? Or is that person more likely to have back pain because they are depressed? I don’t think that there are cause and affect articles in the literature at this point, but there is definitely a high correlation between patients who are depressed and patient who continue to report low back pain.
“In our analysis of baseline data, we concluded that central stenosis, nerve root contact, and disc extrusion were the most important imaging findings related to prior low back pain. Our current analysis indicates that central stenosis, disc extrusion, and root contact may also be risk factors for future low back pain.”
In other words, if you have a major deformity you will probably have pain. This doesn’t mean that you will definitely have pain, it just increases your risk of experiencing symptoms.
The moral of the story is that we cannot deny the brain. The brain has the ability to see pain, and some patients are more susceptible to seeing this pain. Don’t get me wrong, a thorough mechanical evaluation should be performed when a patient has pain, but when this patient is not inclined to respond to mechanical therapy, the patient should be referred to someone that can better handle this patient’s pain.Sometimes, that person will be a behavioral therapist, a psychotherapist, or a clinical psychologist. Physical therapists are not always the go to in order to treat a patient’s pain.
Excerpts from:

Jarvik JG, Haegerty PJ, Boyko EJ. Three-Year Incidence of Low Back Pain in an Initially Asymptomatic Cohort. Spine. 2005;30(13):1541-1548.  

If it hurts it must be bad, or good, or whatever. Vincent Gutierrez, PT, cert. MDT

Louw A, Puentedura EJ, Zimney K, Schmidt S. Know Pain, Know Gain? A perspective on Pain Neuroscience Education in Physical Therapy. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2016;46(3):131-134.

 

  1. “Pain is a normal human experience and essential to survival”

This portion is rarely spoken of in PT school and we spend our time in school learning how to shut down the pain, either in an ideal way of dealing with a mechanical problem or in a way in which we “trick” the brain of not seeing the pain for a short period of time. When working with patients, I often describe the gate control theory as the “Three Stooges” way of treating pain. For instance, if you have a headache and I hit your foot with a hammer, what happened to your headache. I stole the example from my dad, because this is how he would always respond if I told him my arm was sore after baseball practice. This was way back in the 1980’s and he was a laborer by trade. The gate control theory makes sense to most people, but we can also see the example and understand that it is probably not the best way to fix a problem, as we end up with a broken foot from the hammer.

 

  1. “The pain neuromatrix explained our knowledge and understanding of the functional and structural changes in the brains of people suffering from chronic pain”

To simplify, we have pain because our brains tell us that something is painful. This could be due to past experiences, actual painful stimuli eliciting Nociception, super excited nerves , so on and so forth.

 

  1. “biomedical models may induce fear and anxiety, which may further fuel fear avoidance and pain catastrophization”

It is very common for a patient to come into the clinic and say that he/she is avoiding a particular activity because of a history of a herniated disc. There is research that shows that a herniated disc can become “unherniated” (for a lack of a more layman’s term) over the course of 6 months. The patients are never educated regarding this point. Once a herniation, always a herniation is just not true. This biomedical or pathoanatomical (patho=bad and anatomical = body parts) model of health care is outdated and simply is not as useful to use with the general public because research demonstrates that the patient may become “sick listed” and from there stop participating in previously enjoyable activities.

 

  1. “a plethora of papers have been dedicated to a mere 20-millisecond delay of abdominal muscle contraction, yet despite the enormous amount of time, money and energy spent on this science, clinically it has yet to provide results superior to those of any other form of exercise for low back pain”

Doing the vacuum pose while lying down is no better than doing a general squat or learning how to utilize your diaphragm during breathing mechanics. As the layperson, there are many people that want to take your money in the health care industry. (I hate to say it like this, but healthcare is a huge business and the public needs to see it as so.) When the new fad comes out to solve back pain, don’t buy into the infomercial and as a matter of fact, turn off the t.v. and go get a book from the local library. You will spend hundreds of dollars less than what is proposed on the infomercial and be better off after having read the book. Nothing beats knowledge and the smarter you are at taking care of yourself, the better armed you are when you actually get in front of a health care practitioner. Remember, it is a business and we all want your money if you will give it to us. A better use of your time is to come educated so that I don’t have to teach you the basics of posture for 30 minutes, but can instead can teach you how to perform more high level movement patterns instead of sitting properly to reduce your pain. Oh wait, pain is normal. I’d lose my job if I sold this to all of my patients, but instead the patients need to be educated between hurt and harm.

 

  1. “In all health care education, be it smoking cessation, weight loss, or breaking addiction, the ultimate goal is behavior change.”

Speaking as a physical therapist, I can’t stress to the patients enough how the therapy experience is a team. Smart people call it therapeutic alliance, but I’ll settle for team. My part is to educate the patient and attempt to solve the puzzle of the patient’s pain, but it is the patient’s job to take the information that they have gained during the session and go home and apply it to their daily lives. For a patient to do nothing at home, AKA make no changes in behavior, and come to the following session thinking that the pain will go away is similar to :

 

https://spencergarnold.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/snatch-miracle.jpg

 

Patients may come hoping for a miracle, but it is not to be. The patient and therapist have to work together to attempt to solve the pain problem. If one side of the team is not doing their part, then the PT has to be willing to discharge the patient or the patient has to be willing to fire the PT.

 

  1. “…when PNE (Pain Nueroscience Education [pain is a normal human response]) is paired combined with either exercise or manual therapy, it is far superior in reducing pain compared to education alone”

From this I take that teaching the patient and then moving the patient is better than just teaching the patient. We can all agree that low level exercise is good for people. If we don’t agree with this, then we are saying that it is safer long term to live like a slug then to get up and walk around the living room. It just isn’t so. People will refuse to get up and walk around the living room when they start experiencing low back tightness, leg fatigue, or the dreaded “Fran cough” (look it up and btw I am an advocate professionally speaking). We as a society have to start moving more and learn about how our body is supposed to work. This can not be done from infomercials that have pictures of pulsating backs or frowning stomach fat.

And this is my two cents for the night.
If you are in need of physical therapy or would like to sign up for a complementary discovery session (a conversation to determine if therapy is right for you), contact me. 

Functional Therapy and Rehabilitation 

(Now part of the Goodlife family)

903 N 129th Infantry Dr. 

Joliet Il 60435

815-483-2440

Rehab post TKA

Piva SR, Gil AB, Almeida GJM, et al. A Balance Exercise Program Appears to Improve Function for Patients With Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Phys Ther. 2010;90:880-894.

Intro: 37% of TKA’s still have functional limitations p one year. Diminished walking speed, difficulty ascending/descending stairs, inability to return to sport are chief functional complaints. During TKA surgery several tendons, capsule, and remaining ligaments are retightened to restore the joint spaces deteriorated by the arthritis. Some of the knee ligaments are removed or released, which may affect mechanoreceptors/balance.

PURPOSE:

  1. To determine the feasibility of applying a balance exercise program in patients with TKA
  2. To investigate whether an F (functional) T (training) program supplemented with a balance exercise program (FT+B) could improve function compared to FT program alone
  3. To test the method and calculate a sample size for a future RCT with a larger sample size

METHOD: Double-blind pilot RCT (very strong evidence)

Inclusion: TKA in the previous 2-6 months (meaning not eligible for study if the TKA was before 2 months previous)

Exclusion: 2 or more falls in the previous year. Unable to ambulate 100 feet with an AD or rest period, acute illness or cardiac issues, uncontrolled HTN, severe visual impairment, LE amputation, progressive neurological disorder or pregnant (interesting exclusion criteria).

All went through a quadriceps muscle-sparing incision (cuts through the fascia of the patella instead of the quadriceps) this may be a factor in reducing rehab stay.

See the appendix for the protocol (6 weeks).

Testing measures:

  1. Self-selected gait speed (interesting, but probably not feasible for our clinic)
  2. Timed chair rise test (5 repetitions): easily added to our testing.
  3. single leg stance time: easily added in
  4. LEFS
  5. WOMAC

RESULTS:

  1. Adherence for both groups is 100% and the HEP adherence was similar (filled out logs)
  2. walking speed continued to improve over the course of 6 months for the FT+B group and was 25% better than the FT only group.
  3. The interesting fact is that improvement continued up to 6 months, when previous literature describes 3 months and done.
  4. Single leg stance: FT+B improved (as expected due to SAID), but the FT group either maintained or worsened on speed and balance.

DISCUSSION: FT+B demonstrates clinically important differences in walking speed, SLS, stiffness and pain, without adverse events. Subjects in the FT+B could balance on average 4 seconds longer than baseline. This may be important for weight bearing during the stance phase of walking. Performance-based measures should be used in place of subjective measures.

TAKE HOME: Patients will benefit from the addition of balance exercises post-surgically. It may be prudent to discuss with the surgeons of increasing the length of stay in therapy and decreasing the number of visits per week, as progress continues to occur past the 3 months initially surmised. Each patient should be tested with one or more of the following:

  1. SLS
  2. Chair rise test
  3. Gait speed: important indicator of function/independence/death
  4. Balance test (excluding Tinetti due to possible ceiling affect when the patient no longer needs an AD).

If you need therapy after a total knee replacement, you can contact me at the following location.
Dr. Vince Gutierrez, PT, cert. MDT

Functional Therapy and Rehabilitation (Now part of the Goodlife family)

903 N Infantry Dr.

suite 500

Joliet, IL

60435

815-483-2440