Friday, September 23, 2011

Case Study at Train Out Pain Chiropractic: Burning with Sitting

The last few months I have been seeing a 50 year old female for burning pain along the sit bones while sitting.  Upon standing the burning pain immediately leaves.  She had a lumbar fusion L4/5 fifteen years ago.  She had been experiencing the discomfort for about 3 years.  She is an avid golfer.

Five visits later.  No improvement.  I had worked through the hip rotators checking for adhesions along the sciatic nerve.  I had followed tension lines from the upper back all the way down to the calves.  I had dug on the psoas muscles bilaterally.  I had followed tension lines in the front side, shins to pecs.  I had checked and rechecked, sacral/pelvic alignment and multifidi/rotator muscle quality.

Finally, I asked her to stand up brace the abs, sit back down with the brace still intact.  Wonders, no burning, no pain.  Turns out there wasn't any pathology, just lack of strength in the core.  She is also a golfer.  So the prescription became, building up strength endurance in the core muscles.  Burn free sitting.  

1 comment:

Sifter said...

Seems like finding and fixing strength imbalances or weakness is the 'new stretching', i.e. does more to restore balance and pain-free function then stretching does. I still stretch, and disagree with much of what the anti-stretching crowd has to say, but the evidence for strength and more strength is accumulating.