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Desk Jobs and Shoulder Pain

Sitting for long hours daily can impact a person’s wellbeing, ranging from mild to severe. Remaining seated for long hours, day after day, gradually pushes a person’s health towards various complications, often triggering musculoskeletal pains, slowing down the metabolism, increasing psychological stress, and even cognitive dysfunctions. 

Hip pain is one of the common issues treated at VARDĀN. More interestingly, most of the people seeking help for hip pain are desk workers, and they tend to seek advice only when symptoms go awry. 

Why Sitting For Long Hours Proves Problematic? 

Humans were never meant to remain seated for extensive periods. However, technology has made the situation such that sitting time has increased, with desk jobs due to increased computer usage.. 

Increased sitting time is clearly proportional to an increased risk of health issues. The health hazards associated with increased sitting have been ranked the same as smoking a cigarette – the reason being it affects the person’s ergonomics. Long hours of remaining seated leads to east adapted dysfunctional posture, such as leaning to the side, slouching, stretching legs too far straight under the desk, and many more possibilities.

Poor posture, while being seated, increases the action-reaction force through the hip joints, leading to destructive compensatory forces across the body. These forces train the mind to adapt to an inefficient sitting posture daily, impacting the holistic wellness of an individual. This effect can spread to the lower-mid back, even to the neck and shoulders, or remain limited to the hip joint itself.

This is when the hip muscles start getting sore, day after day. At this point, the soreness and pain can be self-managed to a certain extent. Self-management skills include correcting dysfunctional posture, moving out of a chair every 45 minutes or so, stretching or strengthening exercises, or placing an ice pack on the hip.

When Should Medical Assistance Be Taken?
  • Self-management does not provide help to relieve hip pain.
  • History of a fall or injured hip.
  • Pain worsens or travelling down to leg or toes, or even to lower abdominal.
  • Sudden change in bowel or bladder function.
  • Difficulty with daily activities, such as walking, stair-climbing or leaning forwards while seated.
  • Feverish or unexplained weight loss.
  • Post-surgery – abdominal hernia repair, knee surgery, post-lower extremity fractures, heart or other organ surgery
  • Other types of pain history – recent or in the past, affecting the tailbone, lower back slip disc, sciatica type pain, groin pain, abdominal pain etc.
 
Can Hip Pain Have Other Triggers?

There is indeed much medical research evidence for pain in the hip. In medical terminology, pain in the hip and hip pain, are two distinct conditions.

Hip pain, in medical science, refers to pain primarily originating from the structure related to the hip. Structures can be hip muscles, ligaments, other soft tissue, or hip joint surfaces. Related conditions include hip osteoarthritis, Paget’s disease, avascular necrosis, femoroacetabular impingement, and post hip fractures.

Whereas pain in the hip means pain that originates from other parts of the body, referred to as radiating pains. This normally happens due to inflammation of the nerves. Other reasons for pain in the hip can be systemic inflammatory reactions, such as in the case of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and ankylosing spondylitis

How VARDĀN’s FMTTM Can Help Ease Hip Pain?

At VARDĀN, treatment commences, right after diagnosis based on symptoms – confined to just hip pain, pain in the hip (as discussed above), or complex combination of both. This diagnosis is meticulously carried out to determine the root cause of these symptoms. This process of diagnosis considers medical history, quick manual examination, and correlating the same, with radiological investigations.

Thereafter, we begin treatment that adheres strictly to Functional Manual Therapy® (FMT). FMTTM protocol is uniform across VARDĀN, and exclusive among physiotherapy across the country. The treatment protocol involves joint, muscle, and nerve, by principle of mobilizations under physiotherapy. During this process, the FMT TM therapist will offer treatment with a home-based programme, to accelerate the healing process and relieve pain. Developing home-based programmes is essential, and one of VARDĀN’s key strengths. This programme involves icing, sets of certain case-specific exercises, and most definitely, posture while seated. 

If hip pain is ignored or left untreated for long, it can lead to chronic pathology, which may slowly, yet steadily impact the neck, shoulder or upper back too. This may impact productivity at the desk as well as daily routine functions, such as walking, standing, driving, or dressing up.

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