hello everyone welcome back to our channel for those of you are new here
I'm Craig and this is Claire and I am a T4 complete Paraplegic which means
I have no movement or sensation from the chest down so if you have no knowledge
of spinal cord injuries you might be wondering how did Craig's legs just move
in that last clip if he's paralyzed from the chest down
well that is due to muscle spasms and we're gonna tell you all about what they
are and how you can reduce them after the Intro
Okay so what is a muscle spasm?
so muscle spasms are a side effect of a spinal cord injury and they are
involuntary muscle contractions or reflexes which are caused from sitting
too long and causing your muscles to get really tight or as a reflex reaction
from an external stimuli which would cause pain or harm such as something
very hot or a cut or something like that mm-hmm so the reason that people with spinal cord
injuries get muscle spasms is because the responses from your muscles to your
brain can't get through because of the break in your spinal cord the messages
can't get up and through to your brain so because they can't get to your brain
and get a typical response they resort to going to your sort of
secondary brain at the base of your spinal cord which is a lot more
primitive than your normal brain now this at brain at the bottom of your
spinal cord it sends back vastly exaggerated responses to these reflexes
so that's why such a small stimulus can cause such a big response
so while muscle spasms are very annoying they do have quite a lot of benefits to
them so one of the benefits to muscle spasms is that they help to maintain
your muscle tone and they also stop your muscles from atrophying which is one of
the big side effects of a spinal cord injury. So the reasons that you don't
want your muscles to atrophy is because if they are atrophied you then have no
protection for your bones or joints and so you can easily break them doing
transfers yep and another reason is that if there ever is to become some sort of
cure for spinal cord injury if you don't have those muscles you're going to have
to go all the way back to square one to rebuild those muscles before you can
start benefiting from that cure whereas if you've actually got some
muscle mass there you can straightaway benefit from that cure in the future
yeah I mean if your muscles have completely atrophied sometimes you're not
eligible to even try to use them again yeah you might never be able to get your
muscles back if they've gone completely so another benefit of muscle spasms is
it helps with blood flow and circulation so if your muscles are moving it pumps
the blood around your body more and you don't end up with blood pooling in your
extremities and then also, muscle spasms act as a bit of early warning
indicator for certain conditions so for example if my bladder was over full or
my bowels were over full or if I had managed to injure myself below my injury
level couldn't feel it that might result in an increase in muscle spasms so it
might tell me that something's wrong so I know to look out for something. Also if
you've been sitting for a long time you might be at risk of getting a pressure sore. That's another instance where you
might get spasms mm-hm and then one other thing that some
people find useful but not everyone is some people find that they can help them
with movement and make their transfers easier but this is not the case for
everyone and a lot of people actually find that the spasms are worse for their
transfers and actually make it a lot harder to transfer. For me personally I
don't find spasms really help me with transfers if anything they're more of a
hindrance but some people particularly those who have learned how to trigger
certain spasms on demand they can find it quite beneficial for example if
you've got limited core and you're trying to sit up in the bed in the
morning if you can trigger a spasm in your abs then that can help you sit up
or if you're trying to say put some clothes on your legs but your legs keep
bending if you can trigger your legs to spasm and straighten out it makes it a
lot easier to pull the clothes up so basically if if you know how to control your spasms
you can actually get your muscles to work for you and then another drawback
to having muscle spasms is that especially if you with your legs if your
legs just kick out they can actually kick into hard objects and you can end
up injuring your your toes from hitting into things. So Craig's had this quite a few
times where we've looked at his feet and we're like wondering why his toes are
bleeding. It must be because his muscles have spasmed and he's kicked something yeah sometimes
I see it happen it's just like *cringe* although you can't feel it it sort of
makes you cringe a bit because there's not a lot you can do to control it. So I've got
quite alot of sort of broken nails and cuts on my feet from that which is
frustrating. So in general people finds muscle spasms
really annoying and uncomfortable so how can you go about reducing or managing
them. So one of the most common methods for treating spasms straight after
you've had your spinal cord injury is to use an oral drug called
baclofen. So most people ask prescribed this when they first get their spinal
cord injury and they're still in hospital and baclofen is a muscle
relaxant so it stops spasms by relaxing the muscles however the problem with baclofen
is is that it doesn't just relax those muscles that have spasms it
relaxes all your muscles it can have a big side effect in making you very tired
and drowsy and the other thing is baclofen doesn't work for everyone so
personally when I was prescribed baclofen the doctors gave it to me and I
found it wasn't really helping my spasms so every time they reviewed me they just
kept increasing the dose and increasing the dose and I found this still didn't
really help my spasms at all but they just kept making me more and more drowsy
which was a really big downside for me yeah and we found when we were talking
to Craig back in those days we we talked to him and he'd be sort of really
unresponsive because he was so drowsy so I've decided to come off the medication
altogether and I use non-drug methods to manage my spasms which we'll talk about
in a moment so another way that you can manage your
spasms with drugs is that instead of taking oral baclofen there is a
called a baclofen pump which sends baclofen straight into your spinal cord
instead of affecting all muscles yes it's an internal device like roughly
the size of a hockey puck which sits inside your abdomen and then it pumps
it directly into your spinal cord which has a more targeted effect than the oral
baclofen and the benefit of that is because it is more targeted you don't
need to take such a high dose for it to work. So you think you don't get the same
side effects that you do from oral baclofen yeah but you have to undergo a
procedure to get this thing implanted into your body so another way to manage
your spasms is to get Botox injections directly into your muscles now this is
good because it's targeted it targets just the muscles which are giving you
problems and it does this by blocking the signals that your muscle sends to
your spinal cord so it stops the spasms and downsides of this is it's very
expensive and it has to be repeated quite often to maintain its
effectiveness. So one other medicinal way you can stop spasms is by using
CBD oil now CBD oil is quite a new thing it's not yet available everywhere it's
something that we have not tried or have any experience personally of at all
yeah but a lot of people have started using it and have said it has had good
benefits to reducing their spasms so Craig doesn't use any medicines to stop
his spasms so if you don't use medicines how do you reduce your and
manage your spasms. So the number one way of reducing your spasms without using
medicines is by regular stretching so for me personally I find the majority of
my spasms come from my hips and my leg muscles getting tight so if I if
everyday I proactively stretch out these muscles I find that this drastically
reduces the number of spasms I have so now I'm just going to give you a demo of
how I do this. So the first way I do my stretches and I do this every day
generally in the morning and evening is on the bed so on the bed it means I can
lay out flat and that gives my hips and my legs a good stretch and as you'll
probably see this gets quite a lot of spasms out so if I lay back. So already
my stomach's got really tight and my legs are starting to go a little bit. So
that gets a few spasms out. Now once I've done that I then try to
stretch my hips out even more by turning onto my front. Okay so I turn to my front
I cross my legs over... So when I'm on my front I try to stay here for about
half an hour so being on my front gives my hips a really good stretch this
really gets quite a lot of spasms out but I find once they're out that reduces
them but it also has the benefit of taking the weight off of my bum as well
from the pressure perspective. So the other stretch I like to do to help with
my spasms is standing. Now standing is a really good stretch for helping get the
spasms out because not only have you got a really big range of motion but you're
also weight-bearing on your joints which really helps to stretch them out. I like
to stand for a minimum of thirty minutes a day and standing also doubles up as a
way of improving the bone density in your legs and for improving blood
circulation. So they're the main stretches I do but another way you could
stretch out is in a swimming pool because that gives you the opportunity
for your body to stretch out and because of the ease of movement of your muscles
in the water I find this triggers a lot of spasms and
therefore helps reduce them in the long run. So the other way that I manage my
spasms is by doing regular exercise and moving so I find if I sit still for a
long period of time then the spasms start to build up and I can actually feel
them starting to build up because my abs start to get tight and sometimes even my bum
starts to spasm which isn't, it doesn't happen very often but as a sign that
they really built up. So the way to maintain this is just to keep moving all
the time so this gets them all out in little spasms through the day which
sometimes you don't even feel and that stops them building up to a level where
they're annoying and uncomfortable. So those are some of the ways that you can
manage and reduce your spasms if you found them useful please give this video
a thumbs up and if you have any other ways that you can manage your spasms
which we haven't mentioned please put a comment down below and let us know about
it. Remember to click on the subscribe button and click on the bell button to
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you in the next one bye bye