Rating
Your Pain Level
I never
touch new patients without first asking them to rate their pain level on a
scale of 0 to 10. This is essential for working with your pain, and I urge you
to do it.
Before
drinking a single cup of water, write a paragraph describing how your pain
feels and how it looks. By “looks,” I mean how it affects your posture. For
example, if you have lower-back pain, your body may be twisted. Observe
yourself in the mirror and note, “OK, my hip is rotated to the right, and it’s
also tilted to the right.” Jot that down. Then give your pain a number on a
scale from 0 to 10 (use the guidelines in the sidebar). Last, write a
description of it. Is the pain more intense in the morning? At night? Does your
back hurt when you get up after sitting for an hour or more? Use ranges of
numbers if you like. For example, you can say that your pain ranges from level
2 in the morning to level 4 at night. You might also want to have someone take front,
side, and back pictures of you. Hang on to the photos, and compare them to what
you look like a few weeks later. You’ll see a change.
Now begin
the preparatory program. At the end of the ten days, pull out the paragraph you
wrote and use it to help decide whether you’re ready to stretch. After two to
three weeks of stretching, take the paragraph out again and see how what you
wrote then compares with how you feel now. Does your back still hurt after
sitting for an hour? Do you have the same level of pain when you get up in the
morning? Repeat this comparison after another three weeks.
You need a
written benchmark because changes resulting from the program are often subtle.
Even though a 2 percent improvement each day adds up to a major change over thirty
days, many people don’t realize how much they’ve actually improved. Diane, an
attractive, in-shape thirty-sixyear- old, came to me with broad, diffuse pains
running from the front of her hip to her buttock to her lower back and knee on
the right side. After a couple of weeks, she reported that her hip pain had
decreased only from level 4 to 3.5. But when I questioned her further, it
turned out she had neglected to mention that her knee and lower-back pain had
disappeared completely. That was an overall improvement of 50 percent:
everything surrounding the hip pain was dramatically better. Pain actually
distorts your perception; to make sure you gauge your improvement accurately,
you need both a verbal description of your pain and a number level.
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