Kinesio Taping

Kinesiotaping is a popular tool used by healthcare professional like physical therapists.  It is a cotton strip with an acrylic adhesive that is used for treating athletic injuries and a variety of physical disorders.  The tape is used in therapy to relax overused muscles and in rehabilitation to facilitate underused muscles.The elastic properties can also be utilized in a mechanical fashion to limit or encourage a specific motion at a joint.  There is very little evidence that Kinesiotaping does as it advertises.  More clinical trials are in the works, but overall the benefits of Kinesiotaping are ambiguous at best.

Chronic Pain

As a physical therapist, I work a lot with chronic pain.  Its one of the hardest patient types to work with, simply because the origin of the symptoms are deep rooted and often psychological in nature.  A new study out of Northwestern University suggests that ones emotions play a HUGE roll in the chronic pain cycle.  ""The research involved 40 volunteers who had all suffered an episode of back pain lasting one to four months.

Four brain scans were carried out on each participant over the course of one year.

The results, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, made it possible to predict with 85% accuracy which individuals would go on to develop chronic pain.

The nucleus accumbens teaches the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react to the outside world.

Prof Apakarian said it may use the initial pain signal to teach other parts of the brain to develop chronic pain.

''Now we hope to develop new therapies for treatment based on this finding,'' he added.""