Saint Gemma Galgani – The Patron Saint of Low Back Pain

This post is in honor of Saint Gemma, the patron saint of back pain. Her life was one of suffering with spinal pain. Her story is told here on this page. Some additional information can be found on this page.

Throw some prayers up to Gemma if you’re feeling some chronic back pain that just won’t seem to stop plaguing you. Every time you try to get back to exercising or just going for a nice walk in the woods you end up coming home and hurting more than before. If that’s how it is going for you, Saint Gemma knows your struggle. In fact, her struggle sucked way more than yours.

If those prayers don’t do the trick, that’s OK! Sometimes it’s not about just tossing some prayers up there and sitting around and waiting, sometimes you need to do some of the work yourself. That means trying to get more active without hurting yourself, and that means seeking out the help you need to feel better and move better.

That being said, we are here for you. Give us a call @ (301) 378-0334 or send us an email and we will get you on our schedule.

P.S. This entire post here was because one of our patients brought into our office a card they found in our parking lot just laying on the ground. That card is pictured below, and it’s similar to the image I found on Wikipedia (above).

Chiropractic Neck Adjustment

Some people have trouble believing a neck adjustment can do anything good.

As licensed and insured chiropractors working in Frederick for more than 15 years, at Park Bench Chiropractic we can assure you that a neck adjustment from us is both safe and effective.

Does it solve every issue? No. Does every person need a neck adjustment? No.

If you know someone who goes to the chiropractor, you should ask them about their first ever chiropractic neck adjustment. It’s usually something that people don’t forget. For some people it is very scary. It can cause anxiety for a person who you just met to put their hands on your neck. We fully understand how this can feel. For a lot of people the first neck adjustment is when they realized a few things.

  1. Wow, I didn’t realize my neck was stiff and my range of motion was limited until after an adjustment made it feel normal again, for the first time in years.
  2. Oh my! I can’t believe my neck made those noises, and I’m still alive!

If you want a chiropractor who knows when to adjust – and when not to adjust – and you think that a chiropractic neck adjustment will help with your neck pain or headaches, then please give us a call and come in for a free consult or an initial treatment.

If you need x-rays we will send you for x-rays and then go over your radiologist report with you.

If you need an orthopedic consult or a physical therapist then we will send you for that.

If you could use a chiropractic neck adjustment, then we will conduct a thorough history and exam and we will treat you right then and there on day one.

Thanks for reading this, and call us at (301) 378-0334 if you think we can help.

Long Thoracic Nerve

Let’s talk about this nerve.

As a chiropractor, I am always interested in ways that nerves can get irritated or injured.

The Long Thoracic Nerve is a nerve that innervates, among other things, a muscle called the Serratus Anterior muscle. The job of that muscle is to help stabilize the shoulder blade (the scapula) and guide it’s movement. If this nerve is irritated or otherwise dysfunctional then you will have a disorder of shoulder blade movement, and that can become painful. Without normal biomechanics you will eventually experience pain. When things don’t work right, soon enough it hurts.

Check the image to see that this nerve can be irritated at the area of the clavicle or the side of the chest/armpit.

Sometimes this nerve is hurt by stretch (for example, falling so that your head is bent to the side as you land, or if something or someone pulls your head suddenly) or by compression (by something hitting the clavicle area). Other times it is hurt during a surgery or with repetitive overhead activity. There are many ways this poor nerve can be hurt.

When it is hurt, the shoulder blade may “wing”. It won’t stick to the back ribs as well as it should. And since the shoulder blade is the structure that your arm bone actually attaches to, if the long thoracic nerve is funky then you will get an arm problem soon enough. You can also feel the effects of this nerve being irritated in the side of the chest or the armpit area.

If you think this is your problem, come in for a check. We will feel around, see how the serratus anterior is working, and palpate where this nerve should be. Should we think we can help, then we will tell you and lay out some sort of plan. Sometimes the nerve is irritated at the neck where it comes off the spine, sometimes it is near the clavicle in the muscles with there, and sometimes it’s not even this nerve at all.

Call today to see if we can help.

The ‘Oh No!’ Face

Uh-oh. Now you did it.

That feeling when you just did something wrong – a sharp pain shot across your back or down your butt. You freeze in place. You feel like your next movement will cause the same pain to happen again. So you just freeze in place and wait for a minute, anticipating another shot of agony.

It’s hard to say with any certainty exactly what went wrong. It’s a different set of possibilities for every person and every circumstance. No matter what went wrong it is clear that you are on the edge of either your pain fading away into the background or exploding into the forefront. You have the unnerving feeling that this very pain can strike at any time.

It’s pain like this that leads a lot of otherwise healthy adults to engage in “activity avoidance”, which is the habitual non-enjoyment of life resulting from not doing the things you used to love to do because you are consumed with anxiety over possibly injuring yourself severely. To be fair, it is smart to want to avoid pain and injury. But you still need to remain active and use your body as fully as possible every day or else you are going to become more susceptible to having more and more back pain. It’s an unfortunate fact for you that exercising may cause injury but also that not exercising will cause de-conditioning and therefore eventual pain.

Check out this graphic:

Please note that this graphic says “Spinal Cord Injury” and “Muscle Paralysis”…you should substitute the words “Spine Injury” and “Muscle Weakness” into there to make it more appropriate to your probably level of injury. As you can appreciate the more you let your body deteriorate the more you will experience a deterioration in your general health.

Every week or month you spend in that lifestyle is just another shovel of dirt as you dig a hole into sickness and pain.

Wow, that sounded dire, didn’t it? Yeah, it did. And not to sound morose or fatalistic, but you truly should take your physical health very seriously. You only have one body. Surgery can help, sometimes, and doesn’t help other times. You can go get surgery and find out if you want to roll those dice. Probably not a great idea. Your body was issued to you with no warranty. Replacement parts aren’t anything like the originals.

Sheesh, this post is all DOOM and GLOOM, isn’t it? Not totally, because I’m about to type out the part where I offer hope and implore you to try chiropractic.

Here it goes:

We see patients walking in, or stumbling or shuffling in, all the time. We hear people relate the story of their injury on a daily basis, and this post and your pain is something we see all the time. Not every case ends with the patient pain-free and feeling 100%, but we have a decent enough success rate that you should definitely consider trying us out before moving on to more invasive or non-reversible methods. If you think you want to give us a call then do it now and we’ll take down your information and get you scheduled.

Your problem may take 1 visit to get you feeling almost normal again. Or it may take 10 or 20. There’s really no way to know other then to come in and get examined and get adjusted and found out. On the path to a solution you should generally go from least-invasive and least-medicated and then move on to more and more involved treatments and therapies. Chiropractic is a great place to start. If yours is a case we think we can help, we will try our hardest. If yours is one requiring an MRI or a referral to a different kind of provider, we will prescribe the MRI or send you to the other provider.

Are You Bent Sideways at the Waist?

It’s not at all uncommon for a new client to walk in our door looking like they feel horrible. People limp into our office, hunch into our office, lurch into our office, and have even literally crawled into our office. People often show up with someone literally holding them up.

Usually, they leave walking upright.

    When your lower back has this problem people call it all different names. We have patients say things like:

  • “My back went out”
  • “My back is in spasm”
  • “I slipped out of alignment”
  • “I threw my hip out”
  • “I hate life right now”
  • “OMG do I need surgery?!?!”

The client is saying the same thing in most instances – basically, they have intense lower back pain or leg pain and they can’t stand up straight. Something went very wrong.

Look Painful

I tried to pick up the pen I dropped and then BAM!

We want to first let you know that we understand how this feels. We are humans, too. Back pain like yours is a nearly universal dilemma, nearly every person will experience at least one episode of crippling lower back pain at some point in there lives. Many people will endure numerous such painful times in their lives. Many of them will be driven to spinal surgery or painkillers.

At Park Bench Chiropractic in beautiful Frederick we are really good at figuring out what went wrong to have you bent in half. Our initial visit is tailored to a simple goal: put the client at ease, figure out what went wrong, then address the issue. Your first time here will be an hour long process involving a detailed discussion, a physical exam, and treatment.

We also take care to accomplish another very important goal on day one: establish trust. That’s why we don’t waste your time with nonsense therapies or silly lectures. We are going to get right down to the business of getting you upright and walking normally. Instead of trying to dazzle you with garbage marketing or expensive junk we are going to literally adjust, stretch, decompress, and otherwise work to alleviate your problem. The proof will be in the pudding, as the saying goes.

Eat it.

The proof is apparently contained within the pudding.

So, if you are right now all bent out of shape and struggling to get through your days because of pain, then please do give us a call. We probably take your insurance, we are definitely really awesome people, and we can in all likelihood provide you some real relief.