Sports Rehabilitation

Monday 4th October 2021

Hours: 4

Patient presentations:

Reflection Focus

Reflection Model

What Happened?

Patient attends every 2 weeks for symptom management of LBP.
AROM is always assessed before and after treatment. The patient reports easier and pain free movement in lateral flexion and rotation.

What were you thinking and feeling?

I have previously provided some exercises for the participant to try at home; however, adherence is low/minimal. I get the impression from this patient that she enjoys coming in for a massage every couple of weeks and is happy with this as a treatment modality.

What was good and bad about the experience?

I treated the patient for 45 minutes with effleurage, petrissage and STR.
I know that massage only provides short term relief on pain and function in patients to LBP (Furlan, et al., 2015) but I felt like I wasn’t able to treat the patient with other strategies as she is fairly specific and firm with her STM request.

Analysis

During the massage, the patient normally engages in some general conversation. I remember a few weeks back that the participant mentioned wanting to get back to her group exercise classes that were suspended due to COVID. This may explain why adherence to HBE was low and why the patient is happy to come in every 2 weeks as she may be enjoy the social component of coming in to see someone/other people. This also means that the participant is actually avoiding exercise she is just wanting to resume the type of exercise she knows she enjoys. As a result, I was less concerned that the patient had fear avoidance beliefs (FABs) that may exacerbate her sensation of disability (Rainville, et al., 2011) Therefore, I urged the patient to look into some alternative classes that have resumed that she may enjoy.

Conclusion

The patients frequent visits and STM requests align with the evidence that massage is only a short term solution to LBP. I believe the patient may be in less pain if they can return to their exercise class. However, I was not able to recommend any appropriate classes as I wasn’t aware of any. Therefore, I will take them time to generate a list of community based exercise classes that some patients may benefit from.

Revisiting Reflection

References

Rainville, J., Smeets, R. J., Bendix, T., Tveito, T. H., Poiraudeau, S., & Indahl, A. J. (2011). Fear-avoidance beliefs and pain avoidance in low back pain–translating research into clinical practice. The spine journal : official journal of the North American Spine Society, 11(9), 895–903. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spinee.2011.08.006
Furlan AD, Giraldo M, Baskwill A, Irvin E, Imamura M. Massage for low‐back pain. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, Issue 9. Art. No.: CD001929. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001929.pub3. Accessed 15 January 2022.