Well, I have had this blog function for a long time now and many of you have seen the blogs that other people have posted for me. But I thought I would try my hand with a casual post about pain. I spend so much of my time treating people with pain and almost every person wants to understand it better. Most of my patients have been to other practitioners already and think they know what is wrong with them and they are just looking for someone to fix the problem that they have been told they have. For instance people will come in and say they have Plantar Fascitis. They have tried everything from Foot Baths to Surgeries. But the problem is they don’t have Plantar Fascitis. They have pain that is coming from a different part of the foot, i.e. not the Plantar Fascia. It creates quite a bit of confusion but after their pain is better they understand.
So here is the thing. Pain generating nerves are only housed in a few different tissues. So they can be from tissues that are inside a joint, from tissues in the joint capsule or from tissues that are outside of a joint. To keep this simple I always ask my students to repeat this list any time a patient has pain. The pain is either coming from a Muscle, Tendon, Ligament, Joint, Fascia, a Peripheral Nerve, the Central Nervous System or something Vascular. So if someones foot is hurting yes it can be the Plantar fascia. Or it is any other fascia around any other muscle in the foot. Or it is in any other muscle, joint, nerve, vessel, ligament, etc. This becomes very important because it helps to focus the practitioner so they can accurately find the problem. So often people are treating the wrong area.
Oh, and yes the pain my not be coming from the foot at all and it may be coming from the Brain. In which case Brain Based therapies are the most needed treatments. A practitioner who can address all of these different components is going to be more apt to find the correct area of the body that is generating the pain and be able to fix it.
Well I hope this helps and if you have any questions I will do my best to answer them.
Sincerely,
Dr. E