Alternative pain treatments
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Many chronic pain sufferers are desperate for different ways to get relief. For National Pain Awareness week, we’re investigating three types of complimentary pain therapy starting with chiropractic adjustment. We’ll tell you what patients should know before looking outside the box to treat their pain. Chiropractic is probably the most well known among complimentary pain treatments but even many users don’t know how it works.
Chiropractor, Dr. Ralph Sciullo explains “By working at a joint and causing movement in that joint, you stimulate mechanoreceptors, nerve endings in the area, and those nerve endings provide pain relief.”
Dr. Ralph Sciullo, says by realigning joints, you enable movement that promotes pain relief. “When you put someone in a cast, and their joint doesn’t move for a while, it’s not very healthy when it comes out. We want mobility. And a chiropractic adjustment, if it does anything, it restores alignment and restores normal mobility and pain relief comes along with that.”
His client, Joe Turcotte suffers from lower back pain. “When it flares up, I virtually can’t move.” He’s gone to a chiropractor for two decades and has great faith in the method. “I almost crawl into this office and then I walk out afterwards.”
Research has proven chiropractic adjustments do offer some pain relief, even compared to a placebo treatment. But Jason Busse, an epidemiologist who works in the national pain institute at McMaster University, says studies have shown the improvement is modest. “They would look at a real joint manipulation versus a sham manipulation and they found that both tend to show an effect. The real manipulation shows a slightly larger effect but the sham manipulation will also show an effect over doing nothing.”
Both Busse, and Dr. Ramesh Zacharias, who directs the Michael G DeGroote pain clinic, agree that complimentary treatments work differently for different patients. Zacharias suggests setting a timeline for the kind of relief you hope to achieve. “I think people have to be very careful that they don’t carry these procedures on for a long period of time, spend a lot of money without getting the results they deserve.”
Even moderate results can be worthwhile for someone in pain.
