Radical Health Rebel
Welcome to the Radical Health Rebel Podcast, where Leigh, a renowned Functional Medicine Practitioner, CHEK Practitioner, CHEK Faculty Instructor, Active Release Techniques® Therapist, Emotion Code Practitioner, author, and podcast host, takes you on a journey to achieve optimal health, wellness, and happiness. With his extensive training and years of clinical experience, Leigh provides a truly holistic approach to health that has proven effective even when other methods have failed.
Join us every week for insightful discussions and expert interviews focusing on chronic pain, gut health, and skin health. Leigh's diverse background and passion for holistic healing brings you valuable knowledge and practical tips from leading experts in the field. Whether you're struggling with persistent health issues or simply looking to enhance your well-being, the Radical Health Rebel Podcast is your go-to resource for achieving a vibrant and healthy life. Tune in and start your journey to radical health today!
Radical Health Rebel
123 - My Chronic Back Pain Journey with Katie Rothwell
In this powerful episode, I sit down with Katie Rothwell to explore her deeply personal journey through chronic lower back pain that began after childbirth. Katie quickly realized that there was more to pain than just the physical injury to her tissues. This revelation sparked a transformative journey, leading her to uncover emotional, psychological, and even energetic sources of pain that extended beyond the physical.
Katie shares how this journey not only helped her heal but inspired her to support others navigating similar struggles. Today, she offers solutions and insights for chronic pain management, helping people move toward a life less defined by pain. Join us as we delve into the complexities of pain and the path to holistic healing!
We discussed:
0:00
Chronic Back Pain Journey and Healing
13:17
Recovery From Back Pain Misconceptions
23:40
Understanding Pain as a Teacher
34:58
A New Perspective on Pain
43:55
Pain Perception in Extreme Situations
50:13
Emotional Release and Beat Pain
56:41
Nutrition and Movement for Pain Relief
1:07:25
Multifaceted Approach to Chronic Pain
1:16:56
Focusing on Goals, Not Crisis
You can find Katie @:
www.katierothwell.co.uk
https://www.instagram.com/beat__pain__now
https://www.facebook.com/Beatpaintherapy/
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You can find Leigh @:
Leigh's website - https://www.bodychek.co.uk/
Leigh's books - https://www.bodychek.co.uk/books/
Eliminate Adult Acne Programme - https://eliminateadultacne.com/
Substack - https://substack.com/@radicalhealthrebel
YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@radicalhealthrebelpodcast
Rumble Channel - https://rumble.com/user/RadicalHealthRebel
back pain when it, when it appears in that sort of postnatal period, to assume that it's completely physical, because our bodies have gone through a huge amount of change hormonal change and physical change as well. You know the pressure on the pelvis, pressure on the lower back during pregnancy. So my immediate thought was, yeah, I've just had my abdominals cut through because of cesarean section. My core is weak and I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Radical Health Rebel podcast. I'm your host, lee Brandom. This work started for me several decades ago when I started to see the impact I could make on people, helping them to identify the root cause of their health problems that no doctor could figure out, including serious back, knee, shoulder and neck injuries, acne and eczema issues, severe gut health problems, even helping couples get pregnant after several IVF treatments had failed. And it really moves me to be able to help people in this way, and that is why I do what I do and why we have this show.
Speaker 3:In this powerful episode, I sit down with Katie Rothwell to explore her deeply personal journey through chronic lower back pain that began after childbirth. Katie quickly realized that there was more to pain than just a physical injury to her tissues. This revelation sparked a transformative journey leading her to uncover emotional, psychological and even energetic sources of pain that extended beyond the physical. Katie shares how this journey not only helped her heal, but inspired her to support others navigating similar struggles. Today, she offers solutions and insights for chronic pain management, helping people move towards a life less defined by pain. Join us as we delve into the complexities of pain and the path to holistic healing. Katie Rothwell. Welcome to the Radical Health Rebel podcast. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3:Yes, great to have you here, katie, and to kick things off, could you share a little bit about your own background, like your formative years, your educational and professional background, and also your own health journey and your back pain journey in particular?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no problem. So my formative years years I was actually born in Kenya, born in Africa, and spent a lot of my childhood years out there in Africa Somalia, kenya and Ethiopia but came to boarding school over here and during school years I guess I always wanted to be a physiotherapist. I had that interest in the body from quite a young age and when I applied I actually applied two years running but wasn't successful, despite getting my grades. I ended up doing sports, massage and physiology at Glasgow University and I was always quite interested in the cadets and in the military and during my university years I joined the Office of Cadet for the Army and ended up actually joining the RAF as a physical education officer.
Speaker 1:So loved my time in the military and actually it was towards the end of my time in the military and actually it was towards the end of my time in the military that I suffered from my back pain which kind of came on really really suddenly soon after I had my first child. And at the time my husband was also in the military and he was serving abroad in Afghanistan, and I was quite used to being on my own. But being on my own as a solo parent was somewhat different to just being on my own and it was a bit stressful. So I had child number one. That's when my back pain started.
Speaker 1:Then child number two came along and by this point I'd actually left the military and my husband had also left and he took a job in Saudi Arabia and I was waiting to join him and with these things, visas take a long time and I think I was told three months before I'd join him out there and it took nearly two years of me solo parenting with a toddler and a newborn away from family.
Speaker 1:So I was totally on my own and then eventually joined him in Saudi Arabia and by this point I have, as I said, I've left the military and my new job was setting up my own clinic doing sports massage and cranial sacral therapy, mainly because that's what was really helping me and it's something I could do whilst following husband. So I went out to Saudi Arabia which was interesting came with its own challenges and set up clinic out there, came with its own challenges and set up clinic out there, um, and then came back to the uk and I'm now here in shropshire and my back pain is pretty good. I know how to manage it through everything I've learned over the last decade or so, and um life is calm well, that's.
Speaker 3:That's good to hear. It's interesting. You know my own experience working with pain myself as in with clients coming to me with pain, and it's not that unusual from my experience that a female coming to me, the onset of their back pain started after they had a child. And when you think about it, it's not that surprising really. When you consider what the body goes through during pregnancy and childbirth and you know if there's a cesarean as well, that's obviously a another big factor yeah yeah, cutting through the abdominal wall and mine was cesarean as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, again that's yeah, that's something that I see quite often that women coming coming to me with lower back pain when it when it appears in that sort of postnatal period to assume that it's completely physical, because our bodies have gone through a huge amount of change, hormonal change and physical change as well.
Speaker 1:You know the pressure on the pelvis, pressure on the lower back during pregnancy. I had SPD as well during pregnancy. So my immediate thought was, yeah, I've just had my abdominals cut through because of cesarean section, my core is weak and I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, which which was all, just like you know, really doom and gloom, because I still got to take care of this little child.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, again, in terms of the physical. I'm still talking about physical. The other major issue is when you're pregnant, it's very difficult to sleep right, especially later on in in the pregnancy. And now you've got this young baby that's just been born that is not sleeping through the night. So that's another major physical factor that, again, is putting stress on the body. Now, when, whenever your body's under stress, your, your perception of the pain goes down, right, so you're more likely to feel pain at a lower level, right, yeah, so there are so many factors involved with pregnancy and lower back pain, although this is not necessarily what we're going to talk about today, but it's an important thing to consider. That you know again.
Speaker 3:Again, from my experience of what I've seen, there's very little in the way of education. Once someone's had a baby, it's like, oh, you've had your baby off, you go, good luck, right. Oh, yeah, we've just done a major operation on you, cutting through all four layers of your abdominal wall. We've stitched you up off you go. Yeah, there's no, there's no kind of education on okay, so when can I start treating the scar tissue? How do I treat the scar tissue? What kind of person could I go to to help me with the scar tissue? How do I start to reactivate the abdominal muscles? All those things?
Speaker 1:it's just left for the person to work it out for themselves absolutely, and I think I'm I'm so grateful for the lady that was treating me. She, she was a sports massage and cranial sacral therapist herself who was really experienced with scar tissue, really experienced with pregnancy as well. Um, like, I'd never at the time even heard of massaging scar tissue, but she taught me really early on to to kind of to, to get in touch with that scar, you know, and it goes with any scars, doesn't it? Yeah, you have this sort of mental block about touching a scar and especially if it's got emotional attachments whether it's a car accident or whatever trauma happened to that scar, um, having that emotional connection to touch your own scar but then also massage it, break it down, break down the adhesions and things, was really valuable, um, and yeah, I didn't even expect you to bring that up, but that's definitely a factor.
Speaker 1:And pain, as you know, is so multifaceted and I think we can be so focused on the physical causes of pain, like you know. So I had this degenerative disease um diagnosis. I've had my core, you know, cut into. I'm probably put on a few extra pounds because of pregnancy, so I'm carrying extra weight. I'm also carrying a baby, um, either on my left hip or my right hip. I'm not doing as much physical activity as I used to because my time is just swept up being a mum. But what I now know like 10 years down is actually all of that is important. But understanding the kind of psychosocial aspects of pain is so important as well.
Speaker 1:I was dealing with a newborn lack of sleep, like you say, probably wasn't feeding myself very well because it was all just a mad rush.
Speaker 1:And I've got a husband in Afghanistan where I'm like sort of worried about him, obviously, but also a little bit of jealousy in the fact that I was military but I'm at home looking after the child and he's doing his job. You know, and I'm I've had to sort of sacrifice a little bit of my job to be at home, which you know don't mind at all. But I've now learned through listening to sort of mother kind and other mothers that actually that's really normal to kind of resent that and have a bit of anger, um. But I sort of felt the time I'm not allowed to feel that because he's a, he's at war, he's serving the country and I just need to be worried about him. These other feelings are kind of not socially acceptable, um, but I've since learned that actually all of that played a part in my pain how did you feel the fact that you know you just had this baby and your husband's not there, like you're on your own?
Speaker 3:how did that make you feel?
Speaker 1:I think, um, it's fairly normal for men to go away to work, but what's different with the military and, I think, some other jobs is we move around the country to be with our husbands or whoever's in the military, so it displaces you from your family. So his family were in Ireland, my family were in Scotland and we're in Oxfordshire and I've got none of that support network around me. So I build my own support network, which is made up of other military wives and other military wives that just had children. They're all going through the same struggles but they are good people to lean on the same struggles but they are good people to lean on, but at the same time, they haven't got the capacity to help me like like a grandparent would or an auntie or an uncle or whatever.
Speaker 1:Um. So in that respect I felt quite, I think, some quite lonely, you know, in the night, when you're sleepless nights and dealing with a crying baby and you don't know why you can't just phone someone, or phone your husband and go oh, this sucks, because you know you get.
Speaker 1:you get your one call a week or a one call every few days and you just gotta drop everything and pick it up and go hi, how is everything half an hour call and then it gets cut off and it's like oh, that's it so you know it's hard yeah, Physically and emotionally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that. Yeah, I mean, I can't even imagine how, how tough that would have been. Yeah, yeah, very challenging situation. So at what point in your back pain journey did you discover that your pain was not due to your medical diagnosis? Catherine had always been fit and active.
Speaker 3:When she suffered a debilitating back injury, she was barely able to get out of bed or walk without being in excruciating pain. She visited her GP, who prescribed anti-inflammatories, painkillers and muscle relaxants and also referred her to an orthopedic consultant. Catherine was bedridden for 10 days and subsequently could only get through the day with large doses of the prescribed pills. Catherine was diagnosed with a prolapsed disc at L3-4 and she was offered anesthetic injections or spinal surgery. She was horrified and concerned that she would have constant back problems for the rest of her life.
Speaker 3:Catherine was miserable, could hardly drive, a day at work was agony and any movements in bed were very painful. I carried out detailed postural assessments, muscle strength tests and analysis of her movement patterns. I identified the biomechanical problems and prescribed a very specific exercise program to correct her posture, reduce her level of pain and to prevent the injury reoccurring. After five weeks on the program, the pain had reduced hugely in her back and Catherine stopped taking painkillers. After 10 weeks Catherine was back jogging and doing more intensive exercise with absolutely no back pain, and she was so pleased that she was able to pick up her young son again. If you're suffering like Catherine was and you'd like to find out more about getting to the root causes of your back pain, go to wwwbodycheckcouk and request a consultation. Now back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:It was an osteopath that I saw probably a few years in I can't remember exactly when, but it was a good couple of years after my initial diagnosis of that, this disease and he led me to the work of Laura Mimosley and he said look, just go and watch this TED talk by Laura Mimosley. So I did that and my eyes just opened. I thought, oh so, pain isn't just physical. You know, the amount of pain I'm feeling isn't necessarily the amount of tissue damage that I've got. And up until that point I thought my spine's ruined, I'm fragile, I'm weak, I need to look after my spine. I can't do the physical activity that I used to be able to do. And then this work of Laura Mimosley was like no, my spine's fine, my spine is, you know, just aged, as it would have for any 30-year-old. And you know, looking at the statistics of, you know, 100 asymptomatic people at 30, probably about 50% of them will show degenerative discs in an MRI. Probably about 50 of them will show degenerative discs in an mri. Yeah, so I'd say it was probably two or three years into my journey of realizing laura's work.
Speaker 1:And then it was a physiotherapist out in saudi arabia that said, um, you know a physical activity is really important to you, why don't you go out and just run and see how you feel? And up until that point I thought I can't run. The consultants told me not to run, um, but I started running and started to feel a bit better and then started to get more trust in my own body and reduce that fear of movement and started then to kind of associate my pain with stress that was going on. You know, saudi arabia came with its good things, but it also came with its stress factors and I was able then to kind of correlate stress and pain, um, and which was quite a good thing because it meant I didn't fear the pain for it being physically damaged. You know, a lot of people I speak to, part of that pain that they're in, is like oh, is this, this? It now for the rest of my life and it's in bloom.
Speaker 3:So I think, yeah, it was laura's work that gave me that hope that actually my spine is kind of normal and I can get better yeah yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting subject and I I don't know if you're familiar there was a study done by a dutch team and they I think it was a wide range of ages but they studied I can't remember how many people in the study, but they found that 76 percent of asymptomatic people had disc damage. Yeah, I think it was.
Speaker 1:I believe it's quite a range of adults and when you yeah, I've seen another study which lists a whole bunch of age groups and in each sort of decade of age groups they list all the like spinal problems, like old disc, degenerative disc, spinal stenosis and all of that, and it's got all the percentages and all these people had no symptoms.
Speaker 1:So, and you know all the work I've done, since our bodies are really strong, our spines are really really well designed and if we have a bulging disc, we're designed to, you know, for that to slip back and you know, the macrophages come along and sort of clean up any sort of fluid that's come out and heal that disc. And I think, knowing that, for a lot of people, people that come into my clinic and go, oh, I've slipped a disc and they think that's it, that's fine, it's going to hit nerve and I can't move, but we can heal from slipped discs. They're designed to be like that, to be these little shock absorbers. So yeah, I think that's what gives people hope when they've got the back pain. It's like these things are normal and they are strong.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean what I've tended to see in people coming to see me. Most people that come to see me have already been to see a GP, an orthopedic surgeon, whoever it might be, and it's almost like it's been suggested to them that their pain is a one-way street, that it doesn't get any better, that they've got it for the rest of their life. Maybe, if you have surgery, that might sort it out if you're lucky, but there's risks involved with the surgery, or we can just give you painkillers to take for the rest of your life and and it's not a one-way street as you were saying right that you can heal from these things. I mean, in 2013, I had a complete herniation of my l45 disc and a quite severe bulge of my l5 S1. I had severe sciatica as well as being painful, shooting pains and numbness in this, all at the same time.
Speaker 3:I had a drop foot. I could barely walk, but it took me 20 months to rehabilitate because it was. It was a pretty serious injury. Like I probably don't have a nucleus anymore in the in the disc of the l45. Probably that got you know. As you mentioned, the macrophages probably gobbled that up. Um, but I'm completely functional again.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and I'm lifting heavy weights, I'm playing tennis and I'm not restricted in any and I'd say, a 20 month recovery, whilst it's long at the time, actually to me sounds quite quick, because, probably because you know the bigger picture of pain, whereas a lot of people that come in, you know, like you said, they go to the doctors, the consultants and this and they're sort of led to believe that this is it, this is going to be it for life, and they lose hope. Is it this is going to be it for life? Um, and they lose hope. And peter o'sullivan, recently interviewed on the um, wrong and chastity podcast, was said you've got to have hope. If you don't have hope, you can't get better. Yeah, and with hope you can recover. And I'd say, did you? Did you get this injury whilst you were already a practitioner? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and do you think that that accelerated your healing? Having that knowledge?
Speaker 3:Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt, I mean it was interesting because by that point I'd been helping people rehabilitate from lower back injuries, particularly disc injuries, for how long had it been? 12 years, I think somewhere around that 12 years and I was actually embarrassed so I thought I teach people how to recover from this so you know the same thing you would do to recover would actually help preventing it from happening in the first place, right, but what I found was is that I actually learned more about disc injuries by going through the process myself than I did from all my amazing training that I've had and yeah, and the one.
Speaker 3:The one thing I would say is, again, because of my knowledge, the first thing I knew was is that, because it was a disc injury and discs have very little blood supply, I knew they take a long time to heal. So whereas over the years, you know, playing lots of sport, I've had your muscle injury here and there and they heal very quickly in me, like I could. I once pulled my latissimus dorsi. Three days later I was back in the gym, I'm playing tennis, right, I can. I know I can heal very quickly, or at least when I was younger, yeah.
Speaker 3:But but I knew a disc was going to take a long time, so they would. I would go through days, weeks, even months, and I think it's no progress, but in the back of my mind I just kept saying it's going to take time. Just keep doing the right thing. So you know I wasn't just doing things to make my body physically stronger in terms of working on the muscular system, making sure I had good muscle balance around my joints, those kind of things, but I was making sure I was absolutely nailing my nutrition, my hydration, I was getting good sleep, meditating. You know I was doing all those things because I knew that they were going to contribute to my healing.
Speaker 3:But the one thing I always had in the back of my mind was that it was going to get better yeah even though it was taking a long time, I had this inner knowing that I was going to be fine, even though there were times when I was really petrified that I wouldn't be able to do my job properly, that I wouldn't be able to get back playing tennis, that I wouldn't be able to lift heavy weights in the gym.
Speaker 3:And it was really challenging my identity of who I was Right, I mean, I can remember so luckily for me, this happened in June, so the weather was hot. But I can remember limping down my road to get a bus because I couldn't get in a car, so I couldn't drive because I couldn't even sit down. So I was hobbling along the road to get a bus, to go to the GP to get a referral for an MRI, because I kind of I kind of knew what I'd done, but I just wanted to confirm what it was. And I was walking down my road and I just felt so vulnerable because I thought someone could come up to me now it could be an eight year old child and they could mug me and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, cause I had no strength. I had. I was, you know, full of pain. I couldn't run, I could barely walk, I could definitely couldn't fight anyone. I couldn't run, I could barely walk, I could definitely couldn't fight anyone, and it was. It was quite scary and it made me think wow, I now understand how old people feel when they're really frail, because they must feel vulnerable, because they can't protect themselves and that that fear and the scariness, the, that all adds into pain.
Speaker 1:And some of Lorimer's work is, you know he talks about like a footballer injuring his hand won't be as painful as him injuring his foot because he really needs his foot for his career.
Speaker 1:A harpist, injuring her hand would be more painful than her injuring her foot, because she really needs that for her career. So the added worry on top of what part you've injured, like you said, your back, you know, can you still work? That's contributing to pain because it's adding to that fear, anxiety, etc. Um, and I had the same thing with the identity. I. I used to be a very strong, fit young lady. You know, at university I swam the channel, um. I was in the hockey team. I set up the water polo team for the ras the lady, the first lady's water polo team, um, doing swimming competitions, for the arc lane tennis. I was doing assault courses quicker than a lot of the guys on my officer training course. I was a fit young lady and I I was in the physical education branch of the ref, making sure everyone else is fit. And then I can't move. I can't move my back and I've been told not to run, let alone do assault courses. And hiking in the hills, leading expeditions and stuff like that's my whole identity, my career, everything.
Speaker 1:You've taken that from me, um, and you know you don't knock the effect that that has on the physical pain yeah, yeah sure I had an artist recently who had he had a trigger thumb yeah and that's going to really impact what what he does. Yeah, and because it's art as well, I think that's really important for recovery yeah, you can't do your art, let alone you can't work, but you know it's really valuable for a sort of motion release almost on paper, isn't it?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, yeah I. The other thing is, if you injure your mouth or your hand, that can be quite stressful, because if it's a threat to feeding yourself, that can be extra stressful as well, so that can exacerbate more pain. Yeah, and I know one of the. Well, I've never had it and I hope I'll never get it, but I know one of the most painful conditions that I've seen is trigeminal neuralgia, which is a nerve that runs by the jaw, and I'm wondering if that could be because it feels like it's a threat to the system, because if you can't eat, that's going to be a major issue.
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Speaker 1:And also it's in your face. This is a big sort of personal identity area, isn it your face? Any damage to the face, um, would be really scary. And and this is one of the things I try and teach the clients is, um, pain is protective. We, we should embrace pain. It's good for us because if we don't have pain, we don't live very long. Um, but trying to get people to understand that when they're living with chronic pain, it's like what are you telling me that this is a good thing? But it's like trying to get them to see that it's trying to protect you and then working out okay, what is it trying to protect you from? So if you've got this additional fear and anxiety associated with what you've injured and and how it's affecting your life, then the body then goes okay, well, she's, she's in fear, she's anxiety. Whatever, we've got to increase pain because that protects her even more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's when you enter this sort of downhill spiral of chronic pain yeah, in in the czech philosophy, you know we talk about the pain teacher and you know when you have pain it's it's trying to teach you something. So pain has been described as being a way that your subconscious mind makes your conscious mind aware of something. So if you step on something sharp or you put your hand on something really hot, obviously you've done that subconsciously, you haven't knowingly done that. So the pain signals tells your conscious mind oh, your hands on something hot or your foot's on a, on a sharp object. So then your conscious mind says, oh, take my hand away or lift my foot off, right. So pain is there to warn you.
Speaker 3:And I know when we spoke previously I mentioned, um, the book called the gift of pain, and you know the stories in that book are just so enlightening in terms of you know, when they talk about the leprosy colonies and how, you know when someone's got leprosy they lose feeling. So a lot of people with leprosy they start losing fingers and things like that, because you know they might stand next to a fire and they can't feel that their fingers are literally burning away, or they might be chopping vegetables and not realize they've just chopped a finger off. You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:And when you think of it that way, you think actually pain is an enormous gift. It is a gift yeah. You know, if you think you were numb all the time right and you were just going around bumping into things, you would never know you were doing it.
Speaker 1:You would be seriously injuring yourself constantly and that's why people who don't have pain there are studies done, I think, on a boy in india who didn't have pain, um, and he didn't live beyond sort of early 20s I don't think, because, yeah, as you say, you just bump into stuff and you don't realize you're doing yourself damage, um. And I like the czech philosophy of sort of learning, connecting that subconscious with the conscious mind, because I do. I think I tell clients the pain is trying to tell you something. What we've got to work out is the what, the why. And in the cranial, sacral world, we talk about the inner physician and we, you know, when we place our hands on people, we're not doing the treatment as such, we're just connecting to that inner physician and facilitating that person to come, you know, to work it out themselves, whatever that might be.
Speaker 1:So I guess, that's similar to the check practice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, definitely, I mean well, I mean slightly different. But paul check talks about four inner doctors, which is happiness, quiet, diet and movement. Okay, yeah, and they're, and they're all doctors that you have inside yourself and you have to consult with them on a daily basis to keep yourself healthy. So Hippocrates originally came up with a three doctor model, which was happiness, quiet and diet. And Paul Cech said well, in today's society we need movement in there, because back then movement took care of itself, because if you were going to survive you had to move yeah, yeah so you know, listening to your body's own requirements in terms of happiness, diet, quiet, which is rest, and recovery, uh, and movement.
Speaker 3:You can actually get a great understanding of what your body really needs if you, if you learn how to listen yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I think in this day and age, and then this society, certainly the western society, our attention is so much outwardly, you know, we're constantly thinking about the stuff we need to do the boss, the meeting, the driving, the all of that and we very, very rarely tune into ourselves.
Speaker 1:And again, this is what I'm telling the clients the more you tune into yourself, like you said with the meditation and the listening, the more we can pick up these signals earlier.
Speaker 1:And it's a bit like when, if you're a good car owner and you maybe clean your car weekly and you check out the oil and check out the engine fluid and the screen washer and you're you know, you're checking over it on a weekly basis because you're a really good car owner, you very rarely probably get the warning lights that come on. But if you're not a good car owner and you just use it and get it a to b, you're not cleaning it, you're not checking up on it, and warning lights start to come on and you're thinking, oh god, you know, can I ignore it, can I ignore it? And warning lights start to come on and you think, oh god, you know, can I ignore it? Can I ignore it? And then boom, something like the engine's blown. Yeah, it's a bit like that. I think we've got to get used to checking in with ourselves and listening to what our body's trying to tell us yeah, for sure, and that that's a really interesting analogy that you've used about.
Speaker 3:You know the way that you look after your car and the engine warning light, because that's exactly how I see pain, right. So in today's society, in our body, pain is like the engine warning light on your, on your dashboard, in your car. But what most people do is they go to a doctor. They say, oh, I've got this pain. The doctor would normally say here's a painkiller, right. Well, that's like taking your car to the mechanic because the engine warning lights come on and he said, well, here's a piece of black tape, just put it over the light and you won't see it anymore exactly put plaster on the problem.
Speaker 3:Yeah, rather than, rather than, oh, let's look in the engine, let's see what's causing the pain, right? Or the engine warning light coming on. Let let's look in the engine and let's see what's causing the pain, right? Or the engine warning light coming on. Let's just mask it with masking tape. What's going to happen if you do that? Well, as you said, the engine is probably going to have a serious problem, maybe irreversible problem, further down the line, and sadly that's what tends to happen a lot these days. I mean, I know a little bit. Before I had my back injury, one of my cousins had a similar injury, probably not quite as severe as mine actually, and when I was completely healed she was still taking morphine for the pain wow, yeah right and it's like you know I'm I was so grateful for the knowledge that I had that I didn't didn't go down that route.
Speaker 3:Luckily she's okay now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it took a long time to heal because she just wasn't given the right information there's a time and a place for drugs, for sure, and if it gets you out of that hole of pain and gets you onto that road of recovery, then brilliant. But I think the trouble is we can then end up relying on the drugs and then then you get all the side effects. But going, going back to the the car analogy again like if that engine warning lights come on, you assume that the engine's damaged. So you take it to the mechanic and say, right, the engine warning's like coming on, I'm really worried about my engine. And then how often do they turn around and say actually, your engine's fine, it's just a sensory issue.
Speaker 1:And again, we can relate that to pain, can't we? The wiring in the brain has gone a little bit overprotective and oversensitive. Because we're living in a state of stress or whatever it might be, that brain's become oversensitive to any kind of stimulus and then it's flashing these warning lights. But you know, that's very common in things like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, where everything starts to hurt. And trying to get people to understand that, you know, possibly it's the brain. The wiring's gone a bit haywire and we need to just calm everything down. So yeah, it's quite nice. Using the analogy of the car. Again, I think for that one yeah, definitely definitely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's quite interesting when I, when I went to my GP and I, when I went in there, the first thing he said to me was I would take a seat, and I said, oh no, I can't. That was, and he looked at me very strange, I know I couldn't sit down. But right at the end of the appointment he agreed to um refer me for an mri. But he said oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a prescription and I said don't worry, I don't want any. I knew I could handle the pain, but I also wanted to feel the pain right, because I I was pretty sure it was.
Speaker 3:It was a disc issue based, based on my symptoms and and where I was feeling the symptoms. But if I damaged a disc, if I'm moving into a position that was increasing my pain, I knew I was doing more damage at that point. So I wanted to feel the pain, didn't want to mask it, didn't want to mask it. So he wrote a prescription for painkillers and anti-inflammatories and we had this backwards and forwards. I was kind of saying, look, I'm not going to take them in, I'm not going to take them. And he was saying well, as your gp, I need to prescribe them and I'm saying, no point, I'm not going to take them. And that went on for quite a while. And he gave me the prescription, I took it and I just put it in his waste paper bin as I was leaving. I'm not going to take them, but but I do. I do appreciate some people do need that initially, um, but I just yeah, I just didn't want to end up on that merry-go-round that some people would end up on
Speaker 1:yeah, I use it to try and explain pain to people like painkillers can work when it's nociceptive pain, when you've got that initial injury and there is tissue damage, then painkillers can be really useful so that you don't have that neural pathway that becomes really well trodden. Yeah, but if you've gone into that chronic pain, you know you've had pain beyond that three, four months when the tissue probably has healed and you get um prescribed painkillers, that's you know and they go. You know it's not really working. There's a study done. Deepak Ravindran mentioned a study where the effectiveness of painkilling drugs is actually only about 30%, I think. Don't quote me on that, I can't remember the exact figure, but they're actually not that effective in chronic pain and it's because of its neuroplastic pain. It's this wiring that's gone wrong.
Speaker 1:It's this well-trodden neural pathway that is getting overexcited. It's no longer nociceptive pain and trying to get people to realize that that actually go okay. So, yeah, the painkillers are not going to help me in this instant. Yeah, but it does get you out of that acute pain.
Speaker 3:So that it doesn't go into chronic pain yeah yeah, I mean I, I know people that again and I've had clients come to me with similar injury that I had and they were like there's absolutely no way I could not have had painkillers initially. We're all different.
Speaker 1:We're all different I mean child childbirth. You know, don't don't be in humor take the pain relief and um, and I, I mean, I ended up having a c-section, didn't I? So I definitely had pain relief, um, but some people go down the hypnobirthing route. If you can take your mind into that subconscious and not experience pain, then that's incredible, and I know people can use that sort of meditation. I heard of someone going into the dentist and they said all right, we're going to give you an anesthetic. And he goes hang on, don't give me an anesthetic, just give me 10 minutes. And he used that 10 minutes to almost sort of go into a meditative state. I didn't need pain relief.
Speaker 3:It's like, wow, that's incredible yeah, yeah, I mean I know some people have vasectomies under hypnosis and they don't feel any pain, yeah, but then you see some of these like eastern masters and they'll have like long big nails and they'll stick them right the way through their body, you know, whilst they're smiling at you, and then pull it back out again and there's not even any blood, and they do things like put it through their neck and and you think, how do they do that? And it just shows you what we are actually capable of yeah, yeah, and it just.
Speaker 1:It shows you that pain doesn't equal physical damage and physical damage doesn't equal pain. Lorimer Moseley's got a brilliant book I don't know if you've got it called the painful yarns no Stories that he's come across to help explain pain, and one of the funniest ones is this he sits, lorimer sits in A&E and he's trying to mark the moaning and groaning according to their injury and he's like it's not comparable. Like there's someone with an ingrown toenail and even moaning and groaning like mad. Yet there's somebody coming in with the hook of a hammer stuck in his neck and he's holding the end of the hammer and he's like I'm fine. He's like what? You're not experiencing any pain.
Speaker 1:He went no, mate, he's australian and uh he's like god, how did, how did it happen? He goes oh, it's a funny thing. You know, we're throwing hammers across the workshop and it got lodged in my neck. So I was like how, how are you not feeling any pain? And this guy's going around the waiting room and he puts his other hand on his hip to make it look like a fit, the fin of a shark. He goes do, do, do. What am I? I'm a hammerhead shark.
Speaker 1:And as he's doing that, he walks into the coffee table and smacks his knee ah shit, my knee, my knee the triage nurse comes out and goes oh my God, your neck. She goes no, it's my knee, it's my knee. I mean, go figure, how does his knee hurt more than his neck?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Very interesting. I know when was it? I can't think when it was. I think it was just over a year ago Went to see a friend who lives near the coast and we did some paddle boarding and I fell in and I was just about to get back on the board and I looked down and I could see blood floating in the water and I thought, oh, that's a bit strange, what's going on here.
Speaker 3:And I looked down at my chest and my chest was kind of like probably about I don't know eight centimeter gash like across and probably about I don't know what's that 10 centimeters long, and I thought, oh, I better get out of the water. And as I was walking back to my friend's house, everyone that's walking past me was looking at me like, oh my God, it looked like some abhorrent horror film. And I was walking along thinking I can't even feel any pain, like it felt warm, that's all I would say. It felt warm, but it's just really strange how. But I mean, if I got a blister in my foot, that would feel a lot worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and like a paper cut. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So they've done studies on soldiers at war and you know they're in an explosion and maybe they lose a leg or quite a major injury. They don't feel pain at the time until they're sort of maybe getting first aid and being carted off the battlefield. And then that's when they feel pain because, again, knowing that pain is protective, if you were to feel pain straight away it's going to serve you no purpose because you're still in the middle of a battle and you've got to get yourself out of that. But once the brain knows that you're on the road to safety, then it's like, okay, we'll give you pain now, because now we need to tell you to rest and heal.
Speaker 1:There's a story Monty Lynam's book, the Painful Truth, talks about this boy who he knows, I think personally, who's doing a walking safari in Africa and they come across a rhino and then the rhino charges at them and he charges at this 13-year-old boy. So he is adrenaline pumped, you know, legging it away from this rhino and the rhino sort of rear ends and and sends him up into the air and he lands and he didn't feel any pain and then the rhinos ran off and his family and the guides and all that have come to help him and get him to hospital, and the the horn of the rhino has severed his left gluteal and into his abdominal cavity and it was 20 minutes after the injury that he felt the pain wow at the time he didn't feel any pain because I think that adrenaline can override so much yeah because that that innate survival instinct is there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, quite recently actually, an elderly family member of mine fell over in the street, broke their arm in three places, damaged their hip and leg, and luckily two passers-by managed to get this person home, and it wasn't until quite a bit later. The person was in pain when I got there, but we tried to get him to stand up so we could take him to hospital, and at that point he nearly threw up because of the pain, the amount of pain but, but yet he was able to walk back home with the help of these two people.
Speaker 3:One of them was probably holding his arm that was broken in three places, and you think how the hell did that happen?
Speaker 1:yeah, amazing interesting.
Speaker 3:So was there an aha moment for you when you realized what was causing your back pain? 42-year-old Chris came to see me whilst training for his first marathon. Initially, chris wanted manual therapy on his calf muscles, which were taking a pounding from his long runs. I did recommend to Chris several times that he really needed a full exercise, nutrition and lifestyle program so he could complete the marathon in the quickest time and to minimize his likelihood of injury. However, six weeks from his first race, chris suffered a debilitating back injury that meant he was unable to walk and was devastated that all his hard work had gone down the drain. Chris hobbled into my treatment room the next day to see if we could salvage the situation. I suggested to Chris that he do what I recommended all along, and if he did, he'd probably have a 50% chance of completing the marathon. So I gave Chris a full physical assessment and then devised a comprehensive exercise, nutrition and lifestyle program and full credit to Chris. He gave it 100%, totally dedicating himself to the program.
Speaker 3:Days before the race, chris came to see me for a final tune-up and to ask whether I thought he was ready for the race. I suggested he start the race, but to stop if he felt any back pain, as there will always be other races. I received a text message from Chris the afternoon of the race to say that he completed it in 3 hours minutes and he had no pain and had little to no muscle soreness. Chris has since gone on to run multiple marathons in impressive times. So if you're suffering from back pain that's preventing you from doing something that you love, why not arrange a consultation with me at wwwbodycheckcouk so I can show you what's causing the problem and how you can get back to performing at your best?
Speaker 1:now back to the podcast yeah, and it was quite recent. So my back pain was 12 years ago when it the onset of it. And okay, I said I knew about laura mimosi's work. So I've done a lot of study around pain and I deal with pain every day with clients et cetera, and I knew with my cranial sacral work that with cranial sacral therapy you can have these emotional releases. But I'd never really had one and I was having therapy with a cranial sacral therapist myself.
Speaker 1:But a year ago I went and did that part of my training for cranial sacral therapy. You do the somatic emotional release training element and it was in that training where two ladies were practicing on me and my whole body started shaking uncontrollably and you're encouraged through dialogue to talk about what your inner physician is saying, so to speak, and what was coming out was that sort of fear of husband being in Afghanistan but the anger and resentment towards him being at work, carrying on, whereas I was the mum stuck at home. And that anger and resentment is what I'd been locking away and this came out in that session through this sort of body shaking. It wasn't therapist shaking me, it was.
Speaker 1:It was me feeling like I was like really cold and shivery, yeah, and and then I was like really cold and shivery. And then I was like, ah, that's my emotional release that I've been thinking I've needed for so long, and I went back to the therapist that used to treat me and I said why didn't I have this sooner, when I was with you and she said well, because your body simply wasn't ready, you weren't in that safe space.
Speaker 1:I was still fighting fires, so to speak. I was still the stresses in Saudi Arabia, the stresses of being sort of parenting, holding it all together for the children. I wasn't. My body wasn't able to have the release then, and it only happened a year ago. You were settled in Shropshire and I'm able to feel like a bit more myself now. The kids are a little bit older, my husband's not got a job that's away so much and and I had this release. It was like wow, amazing, um. But you know you've got to be in that safe space to to allow that to happen.
Speaker 3:It's not just something that a therapist can do for you yeah, yeah, I've seen many times people have an emotional release when I'm working on them and it can be working on them energetically, it could be working on them physically. I've seen it a lot. It just looks like. Most of the time I've experienced it is when it looks like someone's going into convulsions. It doesn't always quite look like that. I've seen another person actually this was on a check course about 20 years ago and we were doing tai chi every morning and at the end of the session she would just be shaking like yeah, like a shiver, but but really kind of violently shivering yeah, yeah um, which is again, it's just another form of an emotional release.
Speaker 3:Um, but it's, it's quite uh, what's the right word?
Speaker 1:it just feels like when you go through that emotional release, it feels like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders yeah, and a lot, a lot of my clients say that to me when they leave the therapy room, whether they've had an emotional release or not, they just feel like I feel so much lighter, like I've removed a whole bunch of their baggage yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So can you tell us a bit about beat, pain, what, what's, what's?
Speaker 1:that. So, yeah, beat, beat. Pain is the this methodology that I've come up with based on everything I now know about pain over the last 12 years. So it's based on what I've taught myself, what I've learned but also my own experiences. And beat stands for brain energy, activity and therapy. So the brain element is getting to understand that pain is processed in the brain, it's dependent on our nervous systems, activity and stress and emotions, uh, the sort of the psychology, psychology side of that biopsychosocial model, and it's teaching clients about that whole pain process. The knowledge is power kind of thing in order to help them start on their road to recovery. And then the E element the energy is in the form of nutrition and sleep. So, as you know, without sleep we can't heal. We've got to have good, restorative sleep, not sedative sleep from drugs and alcohol, but restorative sleep to to start our road for to recovery. And then the nutrition side of things. You know I've played around with a few diets myself which made me realize the importance of nutrition. So I've gone and done a 12-week nutrition management of pain course. So I'm I've got that knowledge then to help people in pain specifically with their nutrition. So that's the e element.
Speaker 1:The a is activity, like you say, movement. We we have to move in order to get better. We've got to get that blood supply. We've got to challenge our joints. We've got to get rid of waste products. We've got to movement.
Speaker 1:For the mental health aspects, movement is so important, but it's about meeting the client where they're at.
Speaker 1:For some people it might be doing more exercise than what they're doing, or changing their exercise or reducing that fear of movement through a specific exercise technique, whereas others it might be. Let's just get you walking 10 minutes because they're not doing anything, and just walking 10 minutes um is really empowering because they start to see the benefit just from that. And then the therapy side is, um, kind of my hands-on therapy. I do massage and cranial sacral therapy, but with my online clients, when we get to that point, I have such a good understanding of their pain that I can signpost them to other forms of therapy that I think is going to be most beneficial to them. Yeah, because there's so many different therapies out there and I get people go can you fix this, can you fix this? And it's it's hard to know what you can fix, what you can't fix, until you actually got a good understanding of the root causes of the pain and and also different therapies work for different people because of what they believe in.
Speaker 1:You know that placebo effect yeah so, yeah, by the end of that beat pain, I'm in a really good position to be able to say either come and have hands-on therapy with me, I think I can help you, or I think this type or this type of therapist would work for you. So that's yeah, that's the beat pain yeah, yeah, quite like that.
Speaker 3:So what, what's? Um, if you could give like a a little overview of the kind of things people can do nutritionally to help with pain sure, the first thing is get rid of sugar and get rid of alcohol and get rid of ultra processed foods, which all sounds
Speaker 1:a bit doom and gloom, but sugar is so inflammatory and, as we know, like you know, now all this news about ultra processed foods and stuff, it's, it's, yeah. It just inflames the body and along with inflammation comes pain. And I had a client who he had. He thought he'd slipped a disc in his back. He was in so much pain and I was talking about diet with him and he was just like I just don't get it. I don't understand why when you put something in my tummy it could affect my back. So I came up with a military analogy, because I'm ex-military. So in the gut you've got, effectively, the inside of your gut is open to the outside world, isn't it?
Speaker 1:because it's like a tube that goes right through the middle of us yeah so our gut lining has to have a defense mechanism to prevent the baddies from coming in.
Speaker 1:So in this defense mechanism in the gut lining you have these little recce party people with their binoculars looking into the gut lumen and they're looking to see what's going on.
Speaker 1:And if we've got lots of friendly forces, ie the good bacteria, then the defense can be kind of low level. They're not excited, whereas if we get an increase of enemy, ie the bad bacteria which comes along as a result of sugar etc. Then these recce forces in the gut lining kind of go, hang on, we're getting an increase in enemy forces here and start sending signals to the brain, which is hq, and they're sending those signals via the vagus nerve or neurotransmitters, which is more like people on horseback getting to hq a bit slower and the vagus nerve is more like radio transmission, so a bit quicker. So the message gets to the brain um, that we need to. We've got more enemy forces. So what do we do? We increase our defenses, which is inflammatory response, and that inflammatory response can be anywhere in the body and as we know you, inflammation comes with pain, and that pain can end up in the lower back.
Speaker 1:So that's how I explain the importance of nutrition to clients. So, in order to know what changes to make, as I said, cut out those things, but also include um, your omega-3, your leafy greens, lots of veg, lots of fiber, the nutrition, lots of protein for healing yeah um, you know, whole diet, mediterranean diet. If you do a mediterranean diet, you can't really go wrong, I'm honest, uh.
Speaker 3:So yeah, that's the sort of basics of the nutrition element yeah, yeah, I kind of completely go along with with all that. The one thing I'd probably add is uh, try and identify food sensitivities and and cut those out, because again, they're inflammatory foods for that person yeah, and and there's like like a list of common inflammatory foods starting, you know, gluten, soy, eggs, wheat and stuff.
Speaker 1:And if you suspect some of those, then yeah, you can start going down a sort of elimination diet and then reintroduction and things. But often just cleaning up our diets has a massive effect yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's certainly why I think I I healed from my injury so well is because you know I was so kind of on top of that aspect. You know to think about it also. Yes, you want to reduce inflammation, but also what's your body made out out of? It's made out of the food that you eat. So if you're eating high quality food, you're going to have high quality tissues. If you're eating junk food, you're going to have junk tissue and it's not going to heal very well yeah, absolutely, you know.
Speaker 3:Going back to the car analogy, you know, put decent fuel in your car and it functions properly yeah, yeah, and also also putting in the right fuel for the car, right, there's different types of fuel as well.
Speaker 1:So, and because we're all different, you know we're all biochemically different there is a generally a slight difference in what we need nutritionally as well from person to person, but that's a bit more, a bit more specific than it is, but it also comes back to what we were saying earlier and tuning into our bodies and listening to our bodies, you can tend to work out what your body agrees with and what it doesn't agree with. You know, you have a meal you're like, oh, I feel a bit bloated after that. But you know, make maybe, like I've just recently learned with porridge, porridge has meant to be really, really good. I have porridge, I feel really bloated in the mornings and I was advised right, just add some nuts in there, add some cinnamon, bring down that blood sugar spike, and actually that's sort of sorted it out. So it comes with listening to your body as well, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah Again. I'm going to bore all my audience. I've heard this a million times, but porridge oats gives me knee pain.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 3:In my left knee, only my left knee.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I had it. I had it for was it two years? I think I had it for two years. I was trying everything to get rid of this knee pain and then I thought I started eating oats around the same time my knees started hurting and I cut out the oats and within three weeks all the pain had gone.
Speaker 1:All the range of motion was back, absolutely but that's because you're in tune with your body that you've worked that out, yeah, yeah yeah, interesting yeah I know that sounds crazy, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:it To most people, I'm sure, and they were organic, gluten-free. But yeah, my body's like nope, not for me.
Speaker 1:Not for me, absolutely.
Speaker 3:The other thing I was going to mention as well. So obviously you're talking about exercise and movement and we know there's so much evidence out there that when you move it reduces your much evidence out there that when you move it reduces your pain perception as well. Right, just literally, just moving your body is going to reduce your pain. But then there's a lot of people that think, oh, if I move it's going to make my pain worse. So, as you were saying, it's finding the right type of exercise. Now, one thing that I do a lot is I teach people how to move so that they don't create pain whilst they're moving, and it's also part of the recovery process. So, as an example, with my lower back injury, my disc bulges. The discs will bulge more if I flex forwards. So in my exercise I'll make sure that I'm always extending the spine. So not only is it pain-free, but it's also helping to centralize the disc.
Speaker 3:Again, you know the other thing I was going to mention if someone's in pain, one good thing you can do is get in a swimming pool, and you don't I mean swim.
Speaker 3:If it's pain-free, great, but walk in a swimming pool or run in a swimming pool because it's taking so much of the load off of the joints. You know you're pretty much weightless underwater I mean you're not completely weightless but almost and the actual the flow of the water on your body as well actually aids in the healing process. And you know, I remember a good friend of mine. He was a strength coach at chelsea football club for five years when jose marino was was their manager, and sometimes I would go to to the club and he would be poolside with a player in the pitch who's going through his rehab and he spent a lot of time with players in the pool early on in their rehab and they might have sprained an ankle or whatever it might be. So for people out there that think, oh, there's nothing I can do without it hurting, I would say try and get in a swimming pool and literally just walk up and down in a swimming pool. That'd be amazing for you.
Speaker 1:Well, we put um dogs and horses in swimming pools for rehabilitation, don't we? Because it takes the weight off their joints. And and I was really fortunate actually, when I had my, when I initially had my episode of back pain and I was still in the raf, I had some really good medical cover. So that's what covered all my MRI scans et cetera. But I was also able to go on their month long rehab course at RAF Holton and it's literally every day for a month doing rehab. So I've taken off my primary role just to go and get better and the included physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and swimming pool and circuit sessions, relaxation sessions.
Speaker 1:So it kind of encompasses a lot of the things that you and I are now doing um, but to me it didn't quite cover everything because it I didn't. I wasn't fixed from it. I was definitely better and was able to go to work and carry on with life a bit more um, but it was. What it didn't cover for me is that deeper knowledge of pain and that connection between emotions and physical pain and and stress etc. Where our nervous system's at um. But yeah, certainly a really good thing to go and do, a for my recovery, but b for just learning so much about pain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was going to say as well, with movement, like you were saying, movement, just even in a swimming pool, is brilliant. Uh, you know, we release. We've got our own drugs cabinet inside us, don't we? So when we do movement and we're happy and we focus on all this stuff, we actually release the endorphins and we're happy and we focus on all this stuff. We actually release the endorphins and we release those good hormones which have an effect on pain as a pain reliever, which is amazing. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:So what would you say, makes your B approach to pain so unique?
Speaker 1:I think it's really holistic. So pain is so multifaceted. You know there are physical causes of pain, but there's psychosocial, model, social causes of pain as well. There's so many different aspects of pain and there's never one cause either. It's a multitude of factors and I think the beat is one of the few programs that I know of that actually encompasses everything so you know, you go to the doctor, you get the biomedical approach.
Speaker 1:You go to the physio, you get your exercises. You go to the nutritionist and you get a diet program. Um, you go to your pilates instructor and you can get some Pilates exercises or whatever, whereas what I've done is put that all together, so I'm kind of a one-stop shop, and through the program you get to understand the root causes of your pain and through these four pillars of BEAT, you then know what tools to use for your pain. You know, so that you get flare-ups in the future or whatever for your pain. You know, so that you get flare-ups in the future, whatever. You know which elements are to look at in order to manage that flare-up at the time. So I think I don't know many other programs that encompass all of that yeah in in sort of one sitting yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're right, I mean most, most people, if they, if they're in pain, are probably going to go to a doctor, maybe a, maybe a orthopedic consultant, physiotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor, massage that's kind of the journey, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, chiros. And then they get to people like us yeah, I mean some, some.
Speaker 3:You know there are people. I think osteopathy is becoming more and more holistic. From what I'm hearing, yeah if I speak to students, they kind of say, oh no, we're actually, we're doing nutrition and you know lots of other things. Um, but I think I think you're right. I think it's quite sad for most people that to hear about people like us that do things more holistically we're, we're always the last resort because people don't know that we're there and people don't know yeah, we're the last person as well, aren't we along that journey?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah um, because, yeah, they don't know that we're there. And it's such a frustrating thing because I think the society we're in is we. We very much believe that medicine and doctors are, are, you know, the be all and end all. They're going to fix us. But but sometimes and the doctors want to be there that if they, if they're stunned by having no answers from the scans, no answers from the bloods, and they're like, ooh, what next? Here, give you drugs, the doctors want to be able to help. But I think in their training they get something like 15 hours of training on pain. It's not a huge amount.
Speaker 1:So, they don't have an in-depth knowledge of pain and I think they're very good at treating acute pain. Nociceptive pain not a huge amount, yeah. So they don't. They don't have an in-depth knowledge of pain and I think they're very good at treating acute pain. Nociceptive pain yeah.
Speaker 1:When it comes to chronic pain, they're literally just looking at that biomedical approach yeah and and we're in a society where we think that is the thing that's going to fix us and when it doesn't fix us, yeah, you end up with the patients that have tried everything and spent so much money and time trying all these different things. Um, but it's exhausting in itself, isn't it?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, sadly, the the kind of medical model is. It's very linear, right? It's just looking at it from one angle, whereas you've got to look at it from so many different angles. And also the medical model is to treat symptoms. Now, if I go back, was it 13, no, 11 years ago and I had my back injury. If I had just treated the symptoms, there's a good chance I would still be treating the symptoms now, because I would never have dealt with the root cause of the issue.
Speaker 1:Like you say, just put a bit of duct tape over there, the flashing symbol, you'd be fast on the problem.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's an important message for everyone to hear that you've been alluding to is that if you're in pain, it's your body trying to tell you something. So listen, and if and if you can't work out what it is you're meant to be learning from your pain, maybe go and find someone that can help you, you know, work out what that thing is, that you need to learn from your pain yeah yeah, and it's it's so unique to each individual.
Speaker 1:You know, I I've sort of focused on treating lower back pain. That is a similar symptom you know from one person you know got client a lower back pain, client b lower back pain, type c lower back pain. But their root causes are all so different. Yeah, you know, I had one that was um seriously worried about his wife not moving and comfort eating, another one that had a sort of past experience that was really quite traumatic and was going down a downward spiral of almost depression could turn into alcohol, and then another one that was actually doing everything that you think is right eating really well, doing yoga, doing all that. But actually it was a stored emotion from years back.
Speaker 1:That's why we talk about the ACE questionnaire, the first childhood experiences where even stuff way back can still be locked away in our bodies yeah, so yeah these three people, if they'd gone to the doctor, would have got sort of probably the same treatment because they've all got the same symptoms.
Speaker 3:But yeah, the underlying causes are so different yeah, I mean, as you were speaking, I was just thinking of two ladies I've helped over the years. Both had neck injuries. One was completely cured purely through physical treatment. So it was um corrective exercise that I gave her. We changed the diet. You know what's on her lifestyle. I also referred her to a new chiropractor who treated her neck. You know she was lined up for quite serious surgery and she couldn't even move her head. She was in so much neck pain wow um, it was interesting.
Speaker 3:I hadn't seen her for a while and I was going to do an event in this health club and I looked across the gym and it's quite a big gym and I thought, wow, that woman's movement patterns look amazing and she must have a good trainer here at this club. And it wasn't till about 10 minutes later she came up and she's like oh hi, lee, how are you? And I didn't recognize her.
Speaker 3:She looked unbelievable wow and then another lady again I've mentioned this story a number of times who came to me with neck pain, but it was actually caused by her lack of relationship with her mother. That started from a very young age wow and yeah, it only takes it.
Speaker 1:I mean, it takes a lot of work to get to that depth of knowledge, doesn't it? A lot of work from the client yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And again, the other thing I just wanted to say I think is really important as well, and I'm sure you're going to agree with what I'm just about to say is that certainly the way I work. I don't fix anybody. What I do is I empower people to fix themselves. Yeah, I might treat them hands-on and, yes, that can have a difference, without a doubt, but ultimately, for me, it's about educating the person and empowering them to make the right choices to heal themselves absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think knowledge generally is power and we are facilitators. Um, and I and I I said recently on on somewhere, if we're asking for behavior change in a client you know, to improve nutrition or to include movement into their daily schedule or even journaling, in order to get that behavior change, they need to really understand why. Yeah, because if they don't understand that, why they're not going to buy into doing anything that we tell them.
Speaker 1:Yeah that why they're not going to buy into doing anything that we tell them. Yeah, you know you're only going to do behavior change if you, if you call, if your core value believes in it. Yeah, and I think part of what I think you and I do is that educating, really understanding what our core values are, what our core beliefs, yeah, and then the behavior change happens and then the knock-on effect is they start to feel better yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3:For me, the most important session I ever do with a client is the first session, and the first session is called goal setting, where we're both trying to understand what the person wants to achieve, because in reality, most people aren't quite sure what they want to achieve. It's not until you go through the process of goal setting that you really understand what you want to achieve, but why you want to achieve it. And then, once we've done that, we can start to set core values in place that will help them carry out those lifestyle choices they need to achieve that goal absolutely yeah you know, and when they go through struggles, you know we will have down days.
Speaker 1:Don't we go back to the, to the why, what's? The goal, absolutely why we're here yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:So in in the check system, we have a what's called a one, two, three, four system, and the one is called your one love. So it's establishing what your dream is, or your goal. So there's a. There's a famous saying by a psychologist called jerry wesh if you have a big enough dream, you don't need a crisis. Explain that. So if you're clear on what your goal is and you're aiming to achieve this goal all this other stuff around the side, whether it be pain or you know any other kind of troubles in life you haven't got time for that because you're just focusing on that one thing, and once you get clear on that, then you're able to put the things in place to achieve it.
Speaker 1:And you need the crisis to realize what your goal is.
Speaker 3:No. So what it's saying is most people don't know what their dream is. So, therefore, most people are going around in life and things are happening to them, rather than making things happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, does that come in the same kind of subject as manifestations? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know when you really want something and you believe it, and you start changing your mindset. Therefore your subconscious, your brain, starts to find the answers more readily. Yeah, exactly that.
Speaker 3:But as a practitioner I can't help anyone unless I'm very clear on what their destination is. If you get into a taxi and the taxi driver says where would you like to go? And you just say anywhere, are you going to? Says where would you like to go, and you just say anywhere, yeah, are you going to end up where you want to be right?
Speaker 3:yeah and so the way, the way I see my role in one way is I'm like a taxi driver. Someone gets in and they'll say, right, I want to go to glasgow. Well then, I've got to work out how do I get from where I am to Glasgow. I've got to show them the map. Yeah, they've got to do it themselves. Really, I need to get out the cab, but just show them how to get there themselves. Yeah, that's how I see my role.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're right, and everyone's goals is different, isn't it? For some people, it's like I don't want this knee pain because I need to run a marathon. For another person, it's like I just don't want to live with pain because I want to enjoy my grandchildren. Um, you know, I want to be able to go to work without the fog of pain. It's. Pain impacts people in so many different ways, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, yeah. The way, the way that I look at it is I, I want to be pain-free so that I can make a choice to do anything I want to do. I don't want to be limited in any anything, I don't want to be burdened. Yeah. So let's say, for instance, last year a colleague of mine contacted me and he said oh, I, I'm organizing a charity football event. Now I haven't played football since 1992, right. And I thought, oh, I'd love to play, I'd love to play football, right. And the fact that I'm still fully functional and pain-free, although, strangely enough, I pulled my Rexus for Morris training for the event. But I did play, I did play and I did enjoy it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, if someone now said to me, oh, do you just fancy going for a kick around in the park? I'd be like, yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's what life is about, isn't it just saying?
Speaker 3:yeah yeah, let's go and have fun, let's go and do it well, sometimes, sometimes we'll be on courses and lunchtime someone brings a frisbee along and we're all running around the field throwing a frisbee around. You know, I just don't want to, I don't want to be. Oh no, I've got bad back, no yeah, exactly I just want to.
Speaker 3:I just want to be able to say yes to things that I actually want to do. I don't ever want to have to be oh. No, I can't do that because I've got backache. Yeah, I don't ever want to be in that position.
Speaker 1:A good friend of mine, who's a military friend of mine earlier this year, says hey, katie, do you want to do this half marathon with me? It's like I haven't actually run for a couple of years. Um, you know I'm I'm paying free now and I've got some more fitness back, but I haven't run for ages. And he's like, yeah, but you know, just just run the flat bits and then walk the rest. Bearing in mind this chap is an ultra marathon runner, he's rode the atlantic, he came second. I'm like there's no way I could run a marathon, half marathon, with you. He goes no, no, we'll just do, we'll do it our own pace and just come on, just do it with me. So I was like, okay. He twisted my arm and I was like, yeah, okay, I'll do it this, this half marathon I did. He was doing the marathon, um, there was no flats, it was in the Longmond here in Shropshire, so it was up or down.
Speaker 1:And the last thing my husband said to me, before I I did one training run of a 10K and another training run of about 5K and that was it. And my husband said whatever you do, do not injure yourself, because we're going skiing the week after. So at the back of my mind I'm like must not injure myself, must not injure myself. So the first uphill, my left knee starts screaming at me. I was like, oh man, I haven't even started running yet, like there's no way I could have injured myself, but it's screaming at me.
Speaker 1:So I literally did walk the uphills, run the rest and I didn't really care about my time. But I did it. I actually did it in 20 minutes, quicker than my mate did his marathon. But I did it and my knee was sore and I thought I've injured myself. And we go skiing and I'm taking the turns really gingerly because of my knee and I was like I don't know what I've done to my knee. It's nothing very sort of traumatic. It wasn't like I was kicked with a football or something. The last two days of skiing my knee was fine.
Speaker 1:I think it was that little voice in my head going don't injure yourself, don't injure yourself.
Speaker 1:That was my body telling me, warning, warning and the last two, yeah, last two days of skiing holiday and then he was fine weird yeah, yeah, it's not weird, yeah yeah, you're right, I mean I just, I just want to be able to go out and go hiking in the hills and enjoy the children and, yeah, get on with life without pain dragging you down yeah, yeah, again hiking, something I love doing as well, and you know, someone asked me to go.
Speaker 3:I just want to be able to go. I don't again, I don't want to go.
Speaker 1:Oh, you've got bad back, you know, I just want to do it I think people that come in to my clinic and go, you know, is it just old age? I hate that. I was like no, absolutely not. We don't have to get pain as we age. And one of my examples there is a client of mine who's she's a widow 86. She still puts on her waders and goes up to scotland and stands in a river and goes fishing brilliant amazing yeah, yeah, that's you know.
Speaker 3:I said when I was 40 I want to be able to still be playing tennis and moving as well when I'm 70 as when I was 40.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think that's absolutely possible.
Speaker 1:Our bodies are very, very good.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm I'm over halfway there now and I'm still moving as well as when I was 40.
Speaker 1:well as when I was 40. Yeah, brilliant, um, because you live a good life, you're tuned in good nutrition.
Speaker 3:You move a lot. Yeah, all of that, yeah, yeah, and to be honest, to be honest, I wouldn't say I move a lot, I move, I move and I move. Well, it's not. For me personally, it's more about quality than quantity. Um, so I mean, I do. At the moment, I'm doing three gym sessions a week and I'm doing two rpm most people not call them spin classes a week, plus tennis. I don't think that's a lot, and I go for a long, long walk once a week. So I don't think that's a lot. And I'm, and I go for a long, long walk once a week. So I don't think that's a lot, but it's movement every day yeah, exactly, um, and it's also movement that you enjoy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know you, you get a huge amount of reward from from doing that, whereas I think there'll be clients where I say, go to the gym and they'll be like no chance and it won't benefit them because it doesn't resonate with them. Yeah, you've got to kind of meet them where they're at and find what activity you know makes them tick and and tuning into that and finding out, you know, because it movement doesn't have to be. Yeah, going and lifting weights, doing that does it.
Speaker 1:It can just be absolutely anything it could just be walking in the park, walking in the woods, going for a swim, even bowling or something yeah, belly dancing dancing exactly, you know it's and and moving our body in rhythm to music also has further benefits, doesn't it? Yeah yeah, it's finding out, finding out what the client's values are and then tuning in to that and picking up on that to then find a program that works for them.
Speaker 3:Someone once said the best exercise you can do is the one that you will do every day yeah, yeah, it's much easier to create a habit if you enjoy it yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah, so.
Speaker 3:so I would to summarize from what I've heard today pain is a messenger. It's something that you need to understand what it's trying to tell you. It's generally going to need a holistic approach to solve it from different angles. It's generally going to need a holistic approach to solve it from different angles, and pain isn't a one-way street. It's something that you can recover from.
Speaker 2:You just need the right knowledge and application to be able to turn it around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would be my summary. Good summary. I think our bodies have hope and faith in the fact that our bodies are so well designed that we can recover from pain, but it has to have that right environment to do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a believer that if you give the human body what it needs, it can do amazing things.
Speaker 1:It really can yeah. Awesome. Great stuff. So blessed to own these amazing things't we we are.
Speaker 3:We are so, katie, what's what's next for you?
Speaker 1:what's next for me. So I'm I'm building on this beat pain program, trying to promote it to the wider community. So at the moment, I've been treating people in my clinic hands-on, face-to-face, but I want to be able to help more and more people. So at the moment, I've been treating people in my clinic hands-on, face-to-face, but I want to be able to help more and more people. So at the moment, you know it's a one-to-one program online, but in the new year I'm looking to create more group programs because I know the community aspect of recovering from pain is really important and and yeah, so I'm looking to create that program and if people want to sort of stay in touch with me, follow me, keep an eye on what I'm doing. I've got I'm pretty active on instagram, um, at beat underscore, pain underscore now, and I and my website, katierothwellcouk. I've got some resources there in the Wellness Hub that are currently free for everyone and hopefully get people to learn what my approach is about and also learn a little bit about pain education to help them along the way.
Speaker 3:Amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1:Maybe one day I might have my own podcast. Um yeah, I've got aspirations a lot, but one step at a time, eh yeah, absolutely don't.
Speaker 3:You don't want to cause yourself pain by doing too much no, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want to overwhelm myself I've been there and done that one yeah, yeah, it's very easily done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Katie, thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed talking to you about one of my favourite subjects, which is not. Pain is my favourite subject. It's helping people get out of pain. Helping people absolutely. It's my favourite subject.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. It's been really really interesting.
Speaker 3:It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's all from Katie and me for this week, but don't forget to join me same time, same place next week on the Radical Health Rebel podcast. Thanks for tuning in, remember to give the show a rating and a review, and I'll see you next time.
