Dr. Legere’s Guide to: Diagnosing, Treating and Preventing…. Running Pain

By Dr. Marc Legere

Dr. Legere's guide to: Diagnosing, treating and preventing......RUNNING PAIN helps runners keep running. In this book, you will learn what type of injury you possibly have, which treatment options that you can follow to reduce the pain and finally how you can help prevent an injury from developing in the first place. You can't fix the problem effectively without knowing what the actual problem is and with this book, you can finally take your health into your own hands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626759145

Book preview

ISBN: 9781626759145

This book is dedicated to:

My amazing wife Sonya. My whole heart...

JBL and Marla K. You have given me all of the support that a son could ever ask for!

Table of contents:

Introduction

Anatomy:

What muscles am I using and what is their job?

Mechanics:

What is the best position and motion for my body?

Pain:

I have pain when I run. What’s the problem?

Fix:

OK, I know what the problem is. Now how do I fix it?

Prevention:

I am a healthy runner and want to stay that way. What can I do to stay that way for as long as possible?

Conclusion

Introduction

Over my career as a physician focusing on athletes of all levels, I have learned one very valuable lesson:

There is no such thing as a pain free athlete!

No matter what level of athlete that I have worked with whether they are male or female, professional or amateur, college or elementary school and finally but certainly not least, 5 year olds or 95 year olds, they all have pain. The pain can come while they are training, while they are competing or when they are recovering. The pain can manifest from a scratch, pull, tear, break, weakness, hit, strain, sprain, arthritis...... I can go on and on with all of the causes of pain and who has them but one thing is consistent with each injury: they hurt and we wish that they didn’t!

So you might be saying to yourself, What the heck can I do about it? Well, depending on when, where, why and how the pain you are experiencing has come about, I can tell you exactly which muscles or tissues are involved and therefore what can be done to fix the problem. The only way to truly diagnose and fix a problem is to take a thorough history and physical exam. Just like in a classic murder mystery novel, gathering all of the pertinent information will more times than not lead to catching the bad guy. Pay attention, because just like in those books, if you don’t pay attention to every little detail, you can go running into a dead end because you missed an important clue.

A big mistake that some doctors and physical therapists make is to focus on the site of pain instead of looking at all of the possible causes of the pain and addressing them as well. Another problem today is that people are often recommended to use interventions to simply mask the pain that they are experiencing such as pain medications (pills or injections), orthotics or believe it or not, even something as simple as resting the injured area. These measures can give you temporary relief but do they do very much to actually fix the problem? These interventions just hide the pain but as soon as you use the muscle again, or go off of the pain medication or stop using the orthotic will the pain come right back? YES! If you are depending on pain management instead of pain prevention, you are doomed to having repeated office visits in the future, and a steady dose of medications to make your running manageable.

In order to effectively help you uncover what the true cause of your pain is, I need to get you up to speed on which muscles do which motions, which nerves send signals to which muscles and which muscles are where. If we can narrow down our list of suspects, it will be much easier to develop a proper diagnosis and treatment plan. Now, I will not be going into detail about every muscle in every region that we discuss, but I will touch on some of the big ones that are used more often than others. If I were to discuss every muscle, nerve and motion or the body you could be reading a VERY long time. Nevertheless, the first chapter can feel a little overwhelming, but stick with me here. It is a little dry but I will try to make it as simple as possible. I can remember my first day of medical school and being overwhelmed with all of the material. A professor of mine said it best when he said that obtaining all of the information needed for medical school is like trying to take a sip of water out of a fire hose. Just take one step at a time, read only the section that pertains to your injury and you should be fine.

Take a look at the muscles listed in the next few sections and think to yourself, do I hurt in any of these areas? If you do, make a little note on the side of the page and refer back to your note when we get to the section on helping to alleviate the pain.

Anatomy:

What muscles am I using and what is their job?

The neck and upper back:

So, you may be thinking to yourself, I am a runner; is my neck pain related to my daily workout? Believe it or not, there are many runners out there who have