Episode 51: Dr Chelsea Matthews
Myth-busting back pain and getting active - without surgery
healthHackers episode 51 with physical therapist, exercise specialist and former athlete, Dr Chelsea Matthews
In episode 51, we cover:
how Chelsea has helped hundreds of clients get out of pain and back to their workouts without injections or surgery
tips for a healthy back
is rest always the best first aid for an injury?
things to know if you’ve been told you need to lose weight to be pain free
is sleeping on your front bad for your back?
you’ll likely get a disk protrusion one day - but that’s OK
you must always sit up straight for a healthy back - true or false?
staying on top of your mental health during recovery
reframing pain
plus, how strong our spines really are
Working with your body to avoid surgery
If you’ve ever been told that - to get rid of your backache or pain - you need to quit all exercise, lose weight, or think about surgery - then listening to Dr Chelsea Matthews is going to feel like a breath of fresh air.
Chelsea is a physical therapist who specializes in resolving her clients’ pain without resorting to surgery, injections - or any procedures that would mean they have to take time off work.
Through her digital clinic, Catalyst, that allows her to work with clients remotely from her base in Nashville, Chelsea takes a holistic approach to pain relief.
“We tend to think pain means injury, or pain means damage, but our body's actually very resilient and trying to heal itself with the right tools,“ she told me.
Chelsea’s own tools include tailoring movements for pain relief and reframing negative beliefs - some of which may stem from being on the receiving end of a not-so-great scan or medical image of their injury.
“Our body's very resilient and trying to heal itself with the right tools,“ Chelsea told me
“What I focus on a lot with my clients is finding movements in our session that immediately make your pain better so they can see, ‘Oh, you actually have control of your pain, you have this way that you can treat yourself.”
“I think when people start to realize that they can control their pain instead of feeling like their pain is controlling them, then some of those beliefs naturally start to shift,” she told me.
If you follow Chelsea on Instagram, you’ll be familiar with her regular posts debunking injury myths.
One of her biggest bugbears is the notion that if you want to be free of pain, you must stop exercising.
“So much research is showing more and more that the more active we can be in the recovery process, the shorter recovery time we have,” she said.
Chelsea’s an advocate of ‘relative rest’ - a way of staying mobile without becoming sedentary, with the right guidance.
“Say running is painful, that person can still continue to bike, they can still continue to walk,” she said.
In fact, Chelsea explained that for very active individuals, taking away activities and exercises that have been great stress-relievers for them “can actually be quite detrimental to the recovery process.”
Given that back pain is one of the most common complaints affecting most of us at some point in our lives, I wanted to get Chelsea’s expert opinion on some long-held beliefs about taking care of our backs.
Do you remember being told to sit up straight as a child? Even as grown-ups, we think it’s the healthiest way to sit. But according to Chelsea, it’s an outdated myth and a more important factor than good posture is doing a variety of movements throughout the day.
Back pain is one of the most common complaints affecting most of us at some point
“It's not sitting itself that's detrimental to our health. It's staying in one position for a very long time. And we have alarms inherently that sound when we sit for too long. We get discomfort in the backs of our legs, we may feel some back pain - and that's ultimately our body saying, ‘Hey, be sure to move around’.“
As for the idea that you need to lose weight to get rid of your back pain (or any bodily pain), Chelsea said: “Pain is a very big, multifactorial concept that we have to look at and to assume that someone's weight or someone's pain is solely based on their weight is missing 99 out of 100 points that we need to look at.”
She told me some of her clients had even avoided going to a doctor so they wouldn’t have to listen to comments about their weight.
Want to hear more back myths busted? Watch or listen to healthHackers episode 51.
Dealing with physical injury and the consequent recovery can feel like a hopeless and slow process (I’ve had seven bone breaks, so I feel I can relate somewhat), but Chelsea has great faith in the body’s resilience and its ability to heal.
“Our spines can hold 2000 pounds of weight,” she told me. (She’s not suggesting you test that out, but she did outline some things we can all do for our backs to try to keep them healthy. Check out episode 51 for those.)
Chelsea prefers to focus on progress rather than pain, but with one stipulation: “The other thing I always tell my clients is they get three days where they lock themselves in their room, watch Netflix, eat ice cream, be upset, you know, whatever your coping strategy is. But everybody gets a few days where they're just frustrated. And that's a normal part of the process.”
Something else that Chelsea says is normal for most of us is a spinal disk protrusion - a form of disk deterioration that can cause pain in the neck and back.
“If we're fortunate enough to get to be 90 years old, 96% of us will have a disk protrusion. Fortunately, it's something that can heal. And research actually shows that the worse it is, the more likely it is to spontaneously heal,” she said.
By the age of 90, “96% of us will have a disk protrusion,” Chelsea told me
I asked if there’s anything we can do to prevent it.
“No, and it's not a bad thing. It gets villainized as this thing that has to limit us and has to prevent us from doing the things we want to do in life. It's actually just like we get wrinkles on our skin, we have things that show up on images and scans.”
For her clients dealing with aches, pains and injuries, Chelsea’s holistic and movement-focussed framework appears to have a great success rate. She says she’s helped hundreds get pain free and back to their workouts without opting for invasive measures. That doesn’t mean she’s against those methods entirely. But it’s her experience that has heavily shaped her view.
“Injections, surgery are the absolute last, last, last resort and the more years that I practice, the more clients that I've seen that have been told that they need surgery, and then three months later they’re running and playing soccer again,” she told me.
“Our bodies are really amazing. I just help them tap into that movement.”
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Common sense caution: Anything you hear or see within healthHackers content should not be considered personal or medical advice. You’ve all heard it before, so you know the score - always talk to your own health provider about your concerns.