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Official Transcript
Hi, this Dr. Tony Mork, Endoscopic Spine Specialist and author and speaker. Hey listen today I’d like to talk about one of the biggest problems I have with endoscopic spine surgery and how to perhaps solve the problem. The biggest problem I have is people having so little pain so quickly after the surgery within the first maybe 10 to 14 days that they kind of forget about how much they are really able to do. I realized that people are supposed to take it easy for that first six weeks but when the pain starts to go away at 10 to 14 days people want to unfortunately test the work a little bit or maybe overdo it.
There is a technique I’ve thought of that would be very helpful for I think most people as they start walking or really doing any other light activity, and that is using two things: one is a stopwatch, and two is this three by five card or a little notebook pad. The reason that I like these, is because you can objectify your progress on a daily basis. Most people when they do this they start, they feel good. They look at the day, maybe it’s a beautiful day, and the birds are singing and sun’s out, and you tend to overdo it, and think that this is a great thing to do but the next day you end up sore and then you can’t do anything.
So this herky-jerky kind of progress is not the optimum for sure. Using a stopwatch to actually go out say for a walk, five minutes out five minutes, back for ten minutes in the morning, and the same in the afternoon will give you probably a good relaxing walk. If it works good you don’t have any pain afterwards you could advance it to seven or eight minutes, out, and eight minutes back the next day, twice a day, and see how that goes.
So with a stopwatch, your accurately measuring, and with the notebook your recording progress on a daily basis. You will get to a point at which you’re probably going to overdo it, but it’ll only be overdone slightly, and you can move back to the previous level that you’ve written down so you can feel comfortable.
This is important, even when you start to get a bit more closer to the six weeks, and maybe advancing your activities, and maybe doing some pudding or maybe even chipping or something along those lines you can just take the timer, and when it’s time like five minutes is over, just quit before you think it’s going to hurt and then mark where that is, and then advance your progress with the timer so that you don’t keep going backward, you always are going forward.
Hey listen thanks a lot, I think if people use the timer and a three by five card, their post-operative progress would go much smoother and it would go much quicker.
Thanks for listening. Got any questions give me a call at the office or check out the website thank you.