(upbeat music) ♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- 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 five, yeah, we're at top five self-treatments.
We were changing the numbers for a while,
so I wasn't sure- - Oh, sure.
- where we're going with this.
Top five self-treatments for tailbone pain,
which is your coccyx.
And they also call it coccydynia 'cause dynia means pain,
so pain in your tailbone.
- Is that Latin?
- That's a good question, I don't know.
- I think it is.
Anyways, maybe someone can comment on that.
- Maybe one of the persons just wandered in,
can comment on it.
- I see more than one, Bob,
I see 1002. - All right,
yay. (hands clapping)
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- Right, right.
- So.
Yeah, that looks nice.
- You wouldn't like me if I looked like that. (chuckles)
- I'm glad, by the way, as a disclosure,
nobody's sat on that yet, so-
- Well, I know.
- It's okay for you to do that, Brad.
- We just pulled it out of the box.
- (chuckles) So all right, so this,
we get a lot of questions on this, Brad.
I mean, this is a injury that I think is fairly common.
Let's first talk about where the injury occurs.
- Sure.
- So you've got your low back here.
Brad's gonna use this
as a kind of a backdrop. - Backdrop.
- So that the black, it'll show up better.
So this is your low back,
the person will be facing that way.
- [Brad] This way, right?
- [Bob] Yep.
And right below it is the sacrum.
All right?
And then right below that is the little coccyx.
This little bone right here.
It's all fused together,
it's got one little joint there.
Now, normally when you sit down,
the coccyx does move forward like this just a little bit.
And kind of...
It actually acts a little bit as a shock absorber, Brad.
The other point I wanna make is,
that it's not just hanging out in the air like this.
It has muscles and ligaments and tendons.
I mean, it actually gets filled in here
with muscles and that's gonna become important later.
- [Brad] Right, this is well supported.
- [Bob] Yeah, it's well supported.
When you get an injury,
let's say you fall onto your butt.
One of the things that can happen is it can actually get...
It can get fractured or it can get pushed forward like this.
Like that, probably not that far,
but just for visual purposes,
I want you to see it like...
Or it can actually go this way, Brad.
- [Brad] Go out?
- [Bob] Yep.
And that can happen in childbirth during labor.
Yep. - [Brad] Yeah, I can see that.
It can also go off to the side.
I heard one practitioner say it always goes off to the left.
He doesn't know why but it tends to be more off to the left.
It can also rotate.
- [Brad] And this is something,
obviously, you can see in x-rays.
- [Bob] Right. - [Brad] It's a bone.
- [Bob] Or it could do a combination of any one of those.
So.
And a lot of times these tend to get better on their own.
You know, it may take a couple weeks or a month,
but if they don't,
it may be the muscles around them that are acting up,
and spasming on you.
- [Brad] And I don't know what you found,
but I know from real patients,
as well as my wife had this.
- [Bob] Oh, did she?
- [Brad] It was more than a month,
it was a number of months.
- [Bob] Oh, was it?
- Yeah, it can be slow healers.
I think it depends on how you treat it.
- Well, it was a number of months,
because she didn't do the top five things
that we're gonna mention today.
- Well, she didn't ask me.
(Bob laughs)
I got in trouble.
- I think we can...
Okay, so what are some of the common injuries?
Obviously, the fall onto your bottom would do it.
What we already talked about,
during labor it can happen.
I suppose, maybe a baby with a big head.
- (chuckles) Yeah, right.
This is common, I think, in snowboarders.
- Oh yeah, good point.
- 'Cause if they fall backwards,
and with their feet into the boards,
right on their butt and it's typically ice,
and I know they have pads,
special pads in their gear to help prevent that,
'cause-
- Also people who ride horses, Brad.
- Oh I can believe that.
- You can see that 'cause of the bouncy, bouncy, bouncy.
Less common causes would be an actual fracture
when you fall.
But also there can be...
I mean, this is why you wanna get checked out
by a doctor sometimes.
If there was no event,
if you just start having pain there,
you can have a malignancy or a tumor there.
- Sure, a mass.
- And it could also be an infection, so.
And sometimes they just show up.
They're there,
and you don't know why. - Sure.
The things happen unexplained with human bodies.
- So we got kind of our...
Now these are the self-treatments you can do.
There's other things you can try
if your self treatments don't work,
but we'll talk about those when we're done.
But let's start off with number one.
The first thing you're gonna do, Brad,
is just, you wanna try to get it to calm down
a little bit.
So to get it to calm down,
you're gonna try some ice just for a short period of time.
Brad's got the ice pack here.
You're gonna sit on that, Brad?
- Sure.
That'll wake me up, Bob.
- Do you remember the old Happy Days Show, Brad?
- Oh, of course, Fonzie, yeah.
- Yeah but what they always say?
Sit on it.
Wasn't that the joke?
Sit on it, Fonzie. - I don't know,
that's a long time ago. - Sit on it.
(Brad laughs)
- Let's get on with the show, Bob.
- All right, next thing is,
I'd also take, maybe a natural anti-inflammatory,
or like ibuprofen.
And just maybe hit it pretty hard for three days.
And see if that calms it down.
All right, after that or during that period of time,
you do wanna make sure you're not putting pressure
on that area.
And generally people find that it hurts
when they're sitting on and it hurts more,
actually, Brad, when you lean back.
If you lean forward a little bit,
it often takes the pressure off the area.
So we're gonna show you two sitting solutions.
One is obviously just to buy a donut.
And like Brad said, it's clean.
Nobody sat on it yet.
- This one's nice because it has the circle.
And if you look at it this way,
there's actually a groove here and here,
which is gonna allow some space
for the coccyx to be relieved.
- Yeah, I'll put the link below,
they also provided us with some other...
It's called Ergonomic Innovations,
it's the company and it's a really well made,
nice, nice device. - It is.
- Thanks for sending us to it.
- Yeah, it's got a good density to it.
It's not like some of the real soft,
and they go (lips blowing raspberries),
they squish right in.
So yeah, well built.
So the second thing, I need a pillow, Brad.
- Pillow. - Do you mind to go,
and grab that?
- I'm on it. - Brad loves this.
He loves to throw a pillow at me.
- [Brad] Throw you with a pillow.
(Bob laughs)
- So if you don't have one of those,
and you're in a pinch right now,
you just fold a pillow in half like this,
and then you're gonna sit on it.
And you're gonna sit to the point
where that coccyx is off the pillow.
- Let's do a profile with that.
- Dunno if you can see it on here.
- Get that in there.
- So now you can see my...
There's no pressure on the coccyx.
- Right, so this area right back in here is open,
which takes the pressure off it,
which is good.
A good thing for a sore coccyx.
- I had a person that commented one time,
that it saved him on a plane,
in fact, he was like- - Oh really?
- Yeah, he wouldn't have made the flight, he said.
- Oh sure, I can believe it.
- You really wanna avoid putting pressure on that area,
all you're doing is firing up the muscles there so.
So step number three then,
is we're gonna try some heat.
Now you can try a regular heating pad,
but what we think would work even better
is the Thermotex Infrared, Far Infrared.
- Because it goes deeper.
- Right, much deeper.
Normal heating pads just go a couple millimeters.
This goes up to 60 millimeters,
which is two point...
Remember, Brad?
2.36. - Three,
inches.
- Yeah, 2.36. - Yeah, 2.36.
- Whatever, over two inches is pretty good.
- So that can get into those muscles on that pelvic floor.
Which-
- One thing I would say is,
if you fell on it, it's very sore,
I would not use heat until after a few days.
- Right.
And that's why we talk about the ice first.
- Right, exactly.
- Very good point, Brad.
This, the way the Thermotex works,
and we'll put a link below,
it's got a hard pad and that's the side
that you actually would sit on.
This is the platinum model, which is nice,
'cause you could use it all over the body.
You know?
But again, what I like about it, Brad,
it doesn't have to conform completely
to your bottom in order...
'Cause it's gonna go through no matter what,
it's got- - Right,
it's got an air space.
You're gonna get that two and a half inches,
or close to it of depth.
- Right.
And that, to me there's certain cases
where something like this really pays for itself.
And this is one of 'em,
because you're just not gonna get deep enough
with regular heat, so.
All right, moving on,
number four, you could actually try a combination
of the two.
'Cause again, we're trying to calm those muscles down.
- So contrast?
- Yep, contrast.
We could do the heat and then you could do the ice.
So I don't know.
How long would you?
The heat, probably, it takes like 10 minutes
for this to warm up.
So I would probably have it on for about 45 minutes.
I mean, again, you could sit on it,
so you can-
- Right, watch TV, read a book.
- Yeah, do your work.
And then you could throw the ice on for maybe 20 minutes.
- Right.
I don't think you need to go more than that.
But if it was me, I would always finish with the cold pack,
but it could be-
- Sure.
- You can do it however it works best for you.
- Yeah, you want to experiment,
to see what works best for you.
And number five, you're gonna want to try to eventually set
up a sitting schedule.
So when it starts to feel a little bit better,
start sitting and when it starts to hurt,
you get up if you're no longer...
And you might even keep a chart of how long you can go,
and maybe what sitting surface you were on,
when you were doing this.
- They could make an app for this.
- I think there actually is an app for this, Brad.
- Really?
That's amazing.
- Believe it or not, yep. - What those appers do.
Wow.
- So if after you do all those things,
things just don't go get better,
you can do, you know, they do have injections.
This is not a area that I'm a expert in by any means,
but I've known therapists that were.
If you go to probably a larger hospital,
and ask do they have a pelvic floor, physical therapist.
Believe it or not,
I knew two therapists when I worked at Mayo.
That's all they did,
is they were worked on a pelvic floor.
And they would maybe be able to help you
with the muscles around it.
- Exactly.
- Also, I think there are some osteopaths,
or chiropractors that actually do manipulation of the bones.
- Yeah, I've heard of that too.
And it's-
- Again-
- It's invasive, it's a little...
Yeah. - Yeah, yeah.
And then number four,
a last resort by all means, would be surgery.
I think they actually go in,
and actually remove the coccyx sometimes.
- Sure.
And I think that's pretty rare.
- It is pretty rare,
but it is done, sometimes.
So.
All right, Brad,
I think we got out through all of 'em.
- Wow.
- And-
- We got through it once again, Bob, once again.
I'm thinking this could help,
calls for our dilemma.
- What?
You mean for our...
Brad and I can fix just about anything,
except a broken heart. - Well, we're working...
Right.
But I'm thinking this can help somehow 'cause you'd lay down
on that. - I have no idea how
that would help.
How would that help?
- You know,
I'm pretty creative. - Brad, how would that help?
- Just relay this. - All right,
thanks for watching.