Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp physical therapist, Brad Heineck physical therapist,
Together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet, in our opinion of course Bob, top three simple ways you should
I'm sorry top three simple things you should try with fibromyalgia, if my mom had fibromyalgia Brad
These are the three things I would try with her, without a doubt. So I do believe in this and
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Specifically Brad was not liked as a child and we're trying to turn no I wasn't liked either
No, actually both of us were liked but it's a funny story, and we're trying to turn things around
You don't get a lot of likes. Yeah. We'll do whatever we can to get likes. We'll lie we'll cheat. We'll do everything
So Brad all this is really based on mostly this book right here, and this is called "Your
Fibromyalgia Workbook" it's by Adrian Lo
He actually wrote this one by himself because we've mentioned quite a few of his books, big fan of his
This book really covers the step number one, which what we recommend when you have fibromyalgia, and that's education
Basically, this is called therapeutic neuroscience education. That's a mouthful. So what I would do
is if you have fibromyalgia I would try this book first
And if you start believing into the principles of this book then you might seek out a therapist that could help you
with it even further, so you'd want to seek out a therapist that has knowledge in that therapeutic neuroscience education
Because you know you may go to the doctor, they're gonna see ya for 15 minutes, diagnose you with
fibromyalgia, you might be thinking about everything you've heard about it, and how it can change your life into the
Negative aspect, but once you educate yourself and find out what you can do to treat this, doors open up
and it's much more relieving for your whole body. What I liked about this workbook Brad
is that it really it really put forth to me how discouraging
fibromyalgia is. I mean you go to doctors and a lot of them have seen
doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors, the list goes on and on and on and nobody's really helping them
And so it gets very discouraging and they begin to think they can't be helped
And I really think there's nothing further from the truth
And I'm not gonna do justice to this book
I can tell you that Brad because there's so much in there, Brad and I
were just having this discussion, their books have so much in there and it takes a lot to absorb it
It's one of those things you need to read about it because they gave some analogies and they
Take more time, your mind can
absorb it much better with that, you know with this video we're gonna introduce it
Open your eyes that there are some options, some of the concepts here, so for example
They have in here in the book
They have the old diagnosis, the old description of the diagnosis of what
Fibromyalgia is, the old description was chronic and widespread pain located at 11 or
18 tender points, so you have these points throughout your body
There's two here two here two here
and if you had 11 of them now you were diagnosed with
fibromyalgia, the way they want you to think about it is that
It's a process whereby your brain
it knows something about your life, and your brain is making this decision to defend you and
By defending you it actually goes overboard, and it amplifies its nerves, the nerves become hypersensitive
what normally a
person may feel has a little bit of pain, that pain is elevated from all these other stimulus and again
This is one of those things that it's hard to explain in a few sentences. Yeah, he does in several pages
It's like the volume is turned up on your nerves
It's stuck on a high mode and those nerves so instead of responding to
a little bit of pain normally, it actually fires way up, and amplify it
How do we get that volume to turn back down, and we're gonna talk about a few of those things today
but one thing they found Brad just by educating you
I'm gonna show this picture now Brad, sure, I'm ready,
I can't find it, just by educating you, here it is
So tell me where to stand Lonnie
Okay
We're gonna look here
We're not gonna read this, but we're using these diagrams of the brain and some scans of the brain
So this is the scan of a brain that's feeling a lot of pain
You can see the red areas and the other areas that are being stimulated
Representing pain, now after, this is the same brain, it was scanned after it received the education
about what's going on with their
fibromyalgia and look how calm it is, so this is not a change for medication, all just from what the
education their understanding of their problems, so much less
activity there, and I saw the real scans by the way, these are obviously just drawings, but they're good representation
Education is so important to help calm things down, because the things that will fire it up and I'm gonna grab that real quick here
The things that will fire you up are quite numerous, so
Things that will amplify your nerves, or get them more sensitive, the fact that you can't get any better
You can't get an answer about your fibromyalgia, so the anxiety point, thinking you're stuck with this forever
You might have job issues because you can't work very well because you have fibromyalgia, you have failed treatment
Nothing helps. There's no hope, you might have family issues, money issues because you can't work
Constant pain all this just keeps
It stacks on top of each other and it makes the problem worse so we need to unstack things and get you settled down
And that's what we're looking at, the only other thing I'm going to read from here Brad
I know it's really boring when I read things but
The only other thing is they recommend that you
have some of these sayings that you always repeat when you're having pain
One thing is you're sore
but you're safe, so that pain is not damaging your body, but you are experiencing it
Yeah, well the next one fits right along with that Brad, hurt but it does not equal harm
Just because something is hurting does not mean something was harmed or damaged, it just means you have sensitive nerves
Yeah, so a lot of times we have pain, we know something is being literally damaged, you put your hand on a stove
It's burning, you need to pull it off. It's telling you something, in this case,
that's not the case, the brain is creating the pain
There's not really actual damage, so the soreness is from my sensitive nerves
Just because I hurt does not mean something's broken
And I'm just sensitive, sore, and out of shape, which may be true or not, at that part
But right quite often you get out of shape because you can't move because of pain,
So that's the whole step number one, the top three simple things
Number one is education the second thing is what they recommend in the book Brad is some aerobic activity
Really acts as a great one to help calm those sensitive nerves down, and we're not talking about running or anything like that necessarily
Even if you can try to walk rapidly you know ten minutes at least try to work up to it
Get your heart rate up to the 95 to 100 beats per minute, you can do that with a fast walk
Oh, yeah, very much so yeah, you don't have to get out and run or get the treadmill going so you're sweating
And you're huffing and puffing, you can get on the lower
End of aerobic with a good brisk walk, the other thing is Brad
You know they kind of talked about when you're having pain and movement and what to do about that
First off
You know you don't want to have the saying: no pain no gain cuz that's not gonna help
If you just try to push through the pain, you're having a lot of pain
You just work it anyway that's not going to make it better. That's gonna make it worse
But it doesn't also help to stop immediately when you feel pain,
So there's a happy medium, yeah we're going in between Brad, if you're getting pain
They call it teasing the pain
You want to bump into it, you want to push it a little bit when you're feeling the pain, but then back off and
One of the things that we think might help you with that is the Thermatex.
We're a big advocate of this, Brad and I use this ourselves for a
variety of issues, especially knots and stuff like that, but this is infrared heat, the reason we like it
infrared rays or infrared energy
it goes a lot deeper than just a regular heating pad, rand with a device like this you can actually go over
the whole body, you can make a muff and get the hands, you can get the elbows, you get the back, your neck
It's got three panels and those panels help
Provide the energy going into the body, which goes a lot deeper than regular heat
The difference from a few millimeters to 60, right a few millimeters for a hot pack
60 millimeters for this which is
2.36 inches. You're gonna get into that that muscle and warm it up and get that circulation going and then get out and get some exercise
and continue with it, that's precisely what I was gonna say Brad, I'm
hoping that this is going to allow you to move a little bit more. Pick the area
that's bothering you the most and do this, the other thing that's nice to do when this is on Brad
Because again one thing that's going on when your anxiety levels are is your breathing is usually not very good
Yep, so we like 8-6-4 breathing is it?
4-6-8, 4-7-8 I don't get all carried away on the numbers although it's a
nice system, yeah, just going to breathe in through the nose out through the mouth
and relaxed breathing, taking deep breaths while the Thermatex is in place, so the breath in you
hold the air in for a comfortable amount of time, and then you let it out slowly, so it's a controlled deep breathing
So again, we didn't do justice to the book
It really is worth a shot I think if you have fibromyalgia, Brad
Because I'm sure it's been very discouraging with all the things you've probably tried
But education does help decrease pain, so all right anything else Brad? No Bob,
I think Adrian Lo does a really nice job
working with that and as therapists
We appreciate someone helping us out and giving us extra tools, right more tools in the box
Thanks for watching
You