Hello and welcome to my first monthly column for the Lincolnshire Free Press.
My intention is to provide useful and current and informative information on health, beauty and wellbeing issues.
I would welcome any questions you might have, and if I cannot answer it I have a team of very well qualified therapists and practitioners who I can ask to provide you with an answer.
Let me start by introducing myself.
As a physiotherapist I have been qualified over 25 years and have specialised in problems relating to the skeleton and nerves and muscles.
In particular I work with spinal problems and their treatment, not just from a physiotherapy perspective but also injections and surgery.
This means I get to see X-rays and MRI scans as part of my work on a regular basis, and talk to patients about having surgery on their spine.
As a rule we arrange MRI scans not so much to tell us if a patient needs an operation, the reason people have back surgery should be because their pain is so disabling they cannot manage it and they have tried every thing they can to treat it.
The MRI scan doesn’t show us how bad your pain is, only what part is affected and whether surgery might even be feasible if the patient decides they cannot cope.
Sometimes patients have a normal scan, that doesn’t mean we don’t believe they have pain, just that they need pain management not a surgeons knife.
Next time I am going to talk about fibromyalgia.