As a Physiotherapist, our job is becoming harder the more learn about pain. We know that the main relationships in our patients lives contribute to their experience of pain. This is not up for debate, how much it contributes to someones pain is.
We keep up to date with the latest research in pain science, health and rehabilitation and acknowledge the many levers that contribute to the experience of pain at home and in the workplace.
We are talking about physical pain and disease, a sore back, neck or knee joint, and the research is telling us that pain is becoming less about the structure, damage or scan results, and more about how people are looking after themselves, the support and knowledge they have access too.
We are going to take a quick look at relationships and how they can affect us and how they can contribute to pain and dysfunction at home or in the workplace.
Firstly, your mood, emotions, hormones, immune system and support affect your physical body, there is absolutely no doubt, and we have to keep these in the front of mind when we are treating as Physiotherapists.
A study by Kiecolt-Glaser and others looked at marriages between a man and women, this was back in 1987, and they looked at marriage satisfaction and immune system function. Here are some key points from the study. We will let you make up your mind whether someone’s home life affects their experience in the workplace.
- A reduction in marriage quality was strongly and positively associated with poor immune responses. So your body’s ability to deal with stress is reduced if your marriage quality is poor.
- In divorced couples, the 2 psychological factors most closely associated with a poor immune function was:
- Time since break up; the more recent, the poorer the immune function
- The degree of attachment to former spouse; the stronger the attachment the poorer the immune function. If you are unaware of what style of attachment you have to your partner, click this link to find out.
- The less powerful partner in any relationship will absorb a disproportionate amount of the shared anxiety, which is one of the reasons that so many more women then men are treated for anxiety / depression
- The issue is not the strength but power in the relationship; that is who is serving whose needs?
- What is unbalanced in our relationships, so that women are absorbing their husbands stresses and anxieties while also having to manage their own?
We are not relationship experts, but we are experts in managing pain, health and wellness. We have given pain too much credit in the past, we go looking for the source of pain in the tissues and discs and we blame our body for this pain. This is mostly wrong, there are many things that can contribute to pain and unless you are working with Physiotherapists that can recognise and guide people to tools for success, you will keep coming back and never remove pain from your life.
Thats a pretty big statement.
We are also still learning about the complex way our body and brain work, pain is always real but why is my brain producing this, for what reason?
The brain is taking so much information in and has a long memory of things, here are a few things that may help us all understand how emotions and stressors can affect our physical being.
- A German study which looked at Stress inducing asthma attacks in children. When children felt frustrated or criticised, researchers measured a reduction in the flow of air into the lungs, they elicited an asthma attack in the subjects without an allergen response, but by simply criticising the child. This emotion and stress elicited a physical response by narrowing the airways.
- A recent Australian study looked at the Psychosocial factors in the development of breast carcinoma. Women experiencing a stressor, objectively rated as highly threatening and who were without intimate social support had a nine-fold increase in the risk of developing breast carcinoma.
- More than half of people aged over 30 with no back pain have disc degeneration in their spine on an MRI.
The tide is changing, we cannot separate our home and work lives. We need to feel supported and educate ourselves on being the best version we can be. We need new tools and someone that can direct us to tools that work. We have given pain in the body too much credit, find yourself a health professional that thinks the same way.
James Fletcher (MPhty B.ExSci) – Health Stack