Should you stretch “tight hamstrings”?
Check out physiotherapist Keltie Cheney’s quick tip on how to determine how you should approach loosening up tightness in your legs:
Living Well With Chronic Pain
As this fantastic reflection demonstrates, being more empowered to manage pain and promote better health does not necessarily mean cure. The often elusive search to be “fixed” or even labelled with a diagnosis, can be a surrender of your ability to live well in spite of limitations you experience. We generally see that some improvement in…
Fourth Step to Health Empowerment: Metabolism
Metabolism is the sum total of all the physiological and chemical processes happening in your system. It’s energy management within your body and involves a balance of build up (anabolic) and breakdown (catabolic). This process is impacted by nutrition, activity, recovery, drugs, aging, sleep, disease, and more. Managing these lifestyle factors effectively is essentially to…
Second Step to Health Empowerment: Movement
Life is movement. Movement is life. Or as one of my wisest friends who is currently regaining mobility after recovering from surgery learned from that experience: if you have a sound body, you should use it. Movement is often restricted by pain, illness, or sedentary work. Mostly it is restricted simply by not moving enough.…
First Step to Health Empowerment: Mindset
In many ways our medical system and reliance on experts has created a culture of dependence when it comes to health. Most people spend most of their time thinking, processing information, caught up in their heads and somewhat detached from their bodies. In his wonderful book, Mindsight, Dr. Daniel Siegel defines mind as the flow…
Third Step to Health Empowerment: Muscle
When your natural growth rate stops, your body begins to lose muscle unless you are doing something to slow or reverse this process. Known as #sarcopenia, this is the common link to almost everything we call “aging” and is also highly correlated with many chronic diseases. In most people, this process begins in the mid-20’s…
Learning Opportunities
Many thanks to those who came to our seminar series “Understanding and Overcoming Persistent Pain” at the Halifax Library. It was great to help people gain more knowledge about treating and, more importantly, preventing pain. Based on our experience, we know there is a gap in people’s understanding of pain. We wanted to let people know that…
Technology may be hurting your kids
My inspiration for this blog article comes from a recent visit I had this weekend at my sister in-law’s house. They are dealing with an issue that many North American families have to deal with….kids that spend way too much time using electronic devices. She was upset because on a sunny day, her son spent…
Mysterious knee pain and/or swelling?
Without any thorough examination, you may have been given the diagnosis of osteoarthritis and be expected to just live with it. However, you may be experiencing Saphenous Nerve Entrapment. Saphenous nerve entrapment is a frequently overlooked cause of persistent medial (inner) knee pain. I chose to write about it because I saw 2 cases of random knee…
How to know when I need some help
How to know when I need some help for my pain: We trip, hurt our knee. Twist a little too far, your back spasms. That ache in your elbow that used to only be a problem when playing tennis is now bothering you at work and even just reading a book. Checking my blind spot…
