The Tens machine, yoga and pain relief

I'm using my Tens machine and while I accept that there's not much that's going to help the pain that much at the moment I'm not disappointed. Today has been a mixture of a considerable amount of pain relief, then using this machine this evening and a few minutes spent doing some very gentle stretching after reading this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6725967.stm

This interested me as most of my muscular pain is in my back but it amazed me just how many people suffer from low back pain ... 49% of British female workers and 40% of men. That's a lot of people.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4122380.stm

My illness is rather different from this but it is affecting my back a lot at the moment which is part of the reason I take the morphine etc, ofcourse I take it for the other illness too. It's as sore as it looks.

Still, I've started on the new increase of medication today. Started using the Tens machine and done a few very gentle stretching exercises. Just the Lion pose while kneeling, and standing stretching my arms into the air one at a time ........ but you could do that sitting down.

Looking after mum certainly prepared me for all this. I often think of her now and how she coped.

I was offered a couple of sessions of free hypnotherapy which I'll be accepting. And today I was talking to someone who's learning reflexology. She said that this is becoming very popular round here now. I can't have anything like that really at the moment. Not reflexology, or massage, or even, I guess, any Bowen therapy, until my other illness is under control.

Anyway, the steroid sparing drugs were upped today by another gramme and we'll see how that goes.

I've decided that I probably will learn reflexology, though just from a book. I can still remember all the massage techniques and reflexology would be a nice one to add to that. The massage certainly helped mum, think it was the highlight of her day when she was very ill.