Development of SIRPA – Part 1

My journey as a Physiotherapist began in 1983, although I have to say that the past 5 years have been the most rewarding. The main reason for this is that now I see so many life-changing results with people whose lives have been severely affected by chronic pain. So how did a Physiotherapist like me come to specialise in a non-hands on approach that caused a 180? turnaround in my understanding and treatment of chronic pain?

First Steps

Quite by chance, I started off specialising in Respiratory Care, becoming a Superintendent Physiotherapist within 6 years and managing the Physiotherapy Respiratory services within a large city hospital. When I had my first child I decided I didn’t want to work full-time, and took a 6 month position covering for someone on sabbatical, but ended up staying for 15 years! The role expanded over the years, exposing me to a variety of conditions, patients and treatment approaches.

Around the year 2000, I had become frustrated with how limited we were in how we could treat pain. At this time I personally developed severe pain in both thumbs and index fingers for no apparent reason, which not surprisingly caused me problems as a Physiotherapist. My GP and I were both concerned it might be Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Having seen and treated people with severe RA, this was a very frightening prospect. However, a colleague treated me with Acupuncture and within two treatments the pain went and I had no further problems with my hands. I was so impressed with my own results that I decided I would train in Acupuncture. Looking back now, I realise I was going through a very stressful time in my own life and my recovery coincided with a Rheumatologist informing me that I had Osteoarthritis, not RA, which was a massive relief.

Pieces if the Puzzle

I then completed training in Reflexology and Adapted Reflex Therapy (AdRT), and due to exciting new results with the AdRT approach, my NHS Trust asked me to run a pilot study. This was then the start of another major change in my career as I decided to focus more on helping people resolve their pain. I therefore set up my own private clinic in 2005 and interestingly even then I wasn’t prepared to just ‘manage’ pain and called my clinic the Pain Relief Centre. I also trained in a type of Bowen Therapy, called Neurostructural Integration Technique (NST), which, alongside AdRT became my most successful treatments.

Throughout the years of using these complementary approaches I was becoming more and more aware of how important it was to treat the whole person, not just the part of the body that was hurting. I had also realised that my results were improving as my treatments became gentler and recognised that the time I was now able to spend with my patients, therefore improving the relationship and trust, played a large part. I was also perplexed by the fact that occasionally a patient would burst into tears after a treatment and they were often considerably better the next time they came!

2 + 2 = 5?!!!

I was becoming increasingly unsettled by the medical model’s explanation for the symptoms my patients presented with. Things just weren’t adding up and all too often there were inconsistencies between a patient’s symptoms and their diagnosis. Most patients could not recall any injury and had often just woken with pain. On top of this, symptoms very often didn’t match the physical diagnosis, for example the symptoms blamed on a prolapsed disc compressing a nerve on one side would often cause symptoms involving numerous nerves and often even swapped sides.

I was also beginning to wonder why, if core stability is so important in preventing and resolving back pain, I was seeing so many people who had often already worked for months on programmes for core stability, yet they then came to me for pain relief. Other times symptoms would move around the body, bearing no relation to any physical ‘abnormality’ that might have been found on MRI. There were also frequent occasions over the years when patients would become completely pain free, despite still having the severe degeneration that had been attributed to the pain.

You can read the 2nd part of my journey here…

Find out how how my whole understanding and approach to the treatment of chronic pain changed in 2007 and why I am not only able to help people not just manage their pain, but actually recover, and why I am healthier than ever myself.