Hello everyone!
Welcome to the fifth copy of the newsletter.
I was delighted to speak with David Butler a couple of weeks ago about nerve root pain. With his permission, I recorded our chat so everyone could listen. And then I realised I’d started a podcast!
I’ve avoided the temptation to give it a cringey pun title and just gone with “The Sciatica Podcast”. This will be the first of many episodes. I’ll be speaking with experts in the field and people with sciatica. And I think it would be a nice idea too to have the odd journal club or case study; do get in touch if you want to be involved with those.
As you can see, you can listen to my chat with David in this email. By searching for “The Sciatica Podcast”, you should also find it on Itunes, Spotify etc.
It’s a great chat with David, I think. My main goal going into our conversation was to find new perspectives on a topic that David has already written so much about. I think we succeeded.
In other news,
I spoke at TherapyLive on the topic “5 Simple Things We Can Do To Improve Care For People With Sciatica”. I proposed:
We take our time during our assessment to help the person with radicular pain to understand what is going on, using simple language to explain what are often unusual symptoms.
We set the right expectations early on, not implying that acute nerve root pain will inevitably get better in a couple of months or so.
We straight away explain the conditon with reference not only to mechanical compression, but also nerve sensitivity.
We shouldn’t be referral-shy when people have severe acute sciatica (something David and I discuss in our podcast).
We forget about spinal stability and frame our exercises as improving nerve health, instead.
The talk is available as part of a bundle with the other talks on Therapist Learning.
I had an enjoyable, quite rambly and discursive chat with Oliver Thompson on the Words Matter Podcast.
This edition of the newsletter is late because I couldn’t quite get it out before we moved house at the end of last month. We just made a big road trip from Michigan to California to stay with family, and in a month or so we will be driving East again to Texas to settle in Houston!
Although it probably doesn’t make much sense given that I’ve just posted a monthly newsletter more than one week late, I’m planning to make this newsletter weekly now. Weekly, but much shorter! They are probably way too long at the moment for most people to digest. So I’m going to try to make them more focused, but more frequent, from now on.
Which means I should probably sign off now!
Til next time,
Tom
My conversation with David Butler