Working with Hypermobility & EDS – Part 1
Transcription:
My name’s Heather Purdin I’m a physical therapist. I’ve been a physical therapist for 25 years and I’ve been specializing in Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders for about the last 12 or 13 years. My passion is helping people. I want to make a difference. I’ve found with my patients that have this condition that they’re often times not taken seriously and it really creates trauma for them and I really want to help correct that and validate what’s going on for my patients and help them find answers to this complex medical condition that they have. I’m trying to give them a little bit of direction and some hope that things can be better.
Working with Hypermobility & EDS – Part 2
Transcription:
“I started my practice in an orthopedic and sports setting actually, and then soon found out that a lot of my patients had pain that was not going away and I became really interested in the neurology of chronic pain. I read an article back in 1998 from Leslie Russic, who I now do research with. She had discovered that people who are hypermobile have a tendency to have chronic pain at a higher incidence than the average population and that really struck me. I’m hypermobile and I thought, “Well I don’t ever want to have that happen to me,” so I had a little self-interest in researching this condition. I also was really really interested in neurology, I had considered becoming a neurotherapist, but when I learned about orthopedics I found that really compelling as well. Pain science is really the bridge between neuro and orthopedic physical therapy. You get to do both, and so for me, it’s really fun to problem solve! Chronic pain is really complicated and it’s hard to break through so I like that challenge and I love to beat the odds and get the patient well even when they’ve been told they’re going to be stuck like this forever.”
Working with Hypermobility & EDS – Part 3
Transcription:
The connective tissue is everywhere in the body-every organ system, the eyes, the gut, the joints, the skin, everything is affected by a connective tissue issue. We need a team approach in order to treat it effectively. It’s going to be about managing the way that the connective tissue impacts the life of the patient, and doing that from multiple standpoints. Not just joint protection, but immune support, gut support, autonomic nervous system support, and knowing when to go seek resources and who to go see for the right help. Physical therapists typically learn about three or four slides worth of information about hypermobility, and most PTs would say that they know how to treat hypermobility, but will just have the patient not go through their hypermobile range and stay within the normal range, but that’s actually not correct. There is some research that’s showing that working out throughout the full range the patient has gives them better control and confidence and less pain. There’s a lot to be learned about hypermobility and how to actually modify one’s practice around it and unfortunately physical therapy programs are not teaching this at this point. People with hypermobility do have a higher chance of developing a chronic pain syndrome, and so learning to break out of that is really important. I would say some therapists that learn about chronic pain learn that it’s basically a neurological condition and we need to re-pattern the brain and then they’ll ignore the actual physical subluxations that are going on, assuming that it’s just the brain providing inappropriate pain messaging when there’s actually both things going on. For a lot of our hypermobile patients the joint is truly subluxing and not tracking correctly and the brain has gotten hypersensitized and so it feels every little thing that’s off as pain. Both the neurological hypersensitivity to pain as well as the actual joint alignment tracking and position and the imbalance of muscle firing that gets set up needs to be treated so we can’t take either as an orthopedic approach only or a pain neuroscience approach only, it really has to be both put together. Patients really want to learn how to be better, and unfortunately when they go to a doctor’s office a lot of times the doctor assumes they’re just there to complain or they think they’ve got a problem that they don’t have, and what I find is most patients want to learn how to get better and want to learn how to help themselves and are really happy to learn how to do that.
