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Physiotherapists in Wales treat many different conditions including the condition profiled below.
Repeated Loading of Lumbar Discs
Lower loads than the sudden compression loading which occurs seldom can cause a disc prolapse if the loading in a bent position is repeated in a cyclical manner. This can be caused in discs which are reasonably young and causes a large split in the rear of the disc wall to one side or another, allowing the central nuclear material to ooze out. In several examples the layers of the disc wall which were the most outer ones did not split and form a fissure and the nuclear material protruding through the fissure inside built up behind the remaining layers in a bulge. As the ligament overlying this has many nerve endings, such a bulge could cause pain.
Older discs were shown in some cases to have fissures which are already present before any experimental loading and these discs did not prolapse during the loading tests, perhaps because the fissures had healed or because discs in poorer condition are too stiff and fibrosed to prolapse. If twisting, side bending or compression is added to bending then prolapse can occur more easily with less bend of the back. In some cases the nucleus may protrude out but in others the outer disc walls can protrude themselves.
Allodynia . An Abnormal Pain
Most of the pain we feel is .normal. in terms of being similar to what other people feel in similar situations of injury and damage. We get a standard pain after being injured which is the result of the tissue injury and the changes which automatically occur within the central nervous system in response to the incoming pain barrages. Our pains are proportionally related to the amount of unpleasant input we suffer and we only respond with pain to what we expect would be a painful stimulus. This is referred to as nociceptive pain and is the normal kind we suffer from in the way we expect to suffer in certain cases.
Allodynia is a painful response to a normally non-painful stimulus, such as touching, wind passing over a part of the body or the pressure of the water from a shower. Normally the result of a nerve injury but also occurring in pain syndromes such as fibromyalgia, allodynia is an abnormal pain response due to changes within the central nervous system. A heightened, amplified pain response is generated inside the spinal cord or brain, giving the sufferer a high level of very unpleasant pain in response to a trivial stimulus.
Physiotherapists in Wales have contributed some of the many articles on this site such as the one extracted below.
In the back of the upper leg (the posterior thigh) lie the hamstrings, a group of muscles which are particularly vulnerable to injuries and ongoing pain problems in athletic individuals. The upper part of the muscles in the upper thigh and lower buttock are injured much more often than other parts, with the outer side of the leg also more affected. There are no normal names for the three muscles involved which are called the semitendinosus, biceps femoris and semimembranosus, with the biceps femoris being most often involved.Hamstring injuries are classified for ease of diagnosis and treatment into various grades of severity. The least serious injury with a number of damaged muscle fibres is a grade 1 injury, rated as a mild muscle strain. More serious involves a larger number of muscle fibres being damaged and a reduction of muscle strength which is obvious on testing and this is a grade 2 injury. In the most serious or grade 3 injury there is a rupture right through the substance of ...