Chronic pain cycle

This diagram will be familiar territory for many people living with pain. We encounter patients on a daily basis who are stuck in this cycle...

TRYING TO EXERCISE BUT YOU CAN’T BECAUSE OF PAIN? LEADING TO MORE WEIGHT GAIN, MORE TISSUE DECONDITIONING, MORE TIME OFF WORK, MORE STRESS, MORE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, MORE DEPRESSION, MORE PAIN… 

Diagram reproduced with permission from Pete Moore/paintoolkit.org

In many patients this cycle can be minimised to varying degrees. Consortium provides physiotherapy including: pacing, CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), acupuncture, TENS therapy, education, sensibly prescribed simple and graded exercises, medications, injections and manual therapy. These are all valid ways to intervene. Alongside this we offer support, encouraging patients to reach acceptance. Many of these can be easily implemented in simple ways, without significant costs. 

There are many free, easily accessible resources available for patients living with pain. Here are two that we often direct people towards:

LEAFLET explain pain - click here 

video understanding PAIn in less than 5 minutes

Thanks for reading 

Hello! Welcome to our blog...

So this is our first ever blog as Consortium physiotherapists.  We have known for a long time that we wanted to open this clinic and have spent a lot of hours discussing the ideas and principles behind our service.  

We want to provide a forward thinking evidence based approach in a completely open and honest way.  We are passionate about our profession and believe that we can provide a huge amount of expertise to boost the quality of care in our regions private physiotherapy sector.  It is important to us to empower our patients, promote activity and avoid using the long established passive treatments that unfortunately still haunt many private physiotherapy practices across the uk.

We want to utilise this blog as a way to educate our patients about recent developments within our field. We will be including posts that focus on providing valuable advice and information, dispelling many of the traditional myths that we find are still being fed to patients on a day to day basis. 

We also want our customer experience at Consortium to be comfortable, convenient and enjoyable. For that reason we have spent a lot of hours considering how we want our clinic to look and feel inside. We are renovating what will be our clinic site as we speak and let's just say it has been a labour of love. Anyway, the diggers have now finally cleared out, the excavation is complete and we are starting to see some exciting progress! The building itself is a pretty old one, with a good amount of character so we intend to make the most of this and keep its style traditional but with a modern edge. Inside there will be two large private clinic rooms, a comfortable waiting area with reading material, TV and Wi-fi for customer use (some home comforts are always good). 

Outside we have a large spacious private car park, accessed through a private gated entry for an easy parking experience. We hope to be ready to see patients early in 2016. There is quite a bit of extra land on site so once up and running we also plan to build a well equipped gym to aid aspects of our exercise therapy and movement analysis.

So that's an update on where we are at the moment with Consortium. Now that you know a bit about us as a group,  next time we'll share a bit more about us as individuals and let you know what each of us will bring to the service.  We hope you'll join us to read this from time to time and feel free to share your comments, they are always welcome.

Thanks,
The Consortium Team