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Philosophy

Acute Care | Chronic Care | Prevention | Sports Medicine | Back to Home

Our goal at the L.A. Sports and Spine Center is to help patients resume or maintain as active a lifestyle as they would like. We address each individual's personal concerns and then offer a customized step by step plan of action to help them achieve their goals. The L.A . Sports & Spine Center is designed to help patients get out of pain and back to activity as quickly as possible. Once we have determined that the pain is due to a mechanical cause - rather than something serious (e.g. tumor, infection) - then we take a two-pronged approach.

• One, we show patients what they can do for themself (i.e. what activities to avoid and which to perform).
• Two, we offer customized treatments to speed recovery which incorporate chiropractic, soft tissue, physical therapy, and supervised exercise methods.

A unique feature of care at LA Sports & Spine

• An essential ingredient in getting better quickly is learning what "first-aid" exercises to perform.
• Most of these are simple limbering manuvers or gentle exercises for the deep "core" muscles which stabilize the spine or joints.

Chronic patients are a special concern of ours. Most patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain (MSP) have tried many treatments before and nothing has had a real lasting effect. Most chronic pain patients have had to give up activities which they enjoy. It is our goal to help them return to a more active lifestyle again. This will not be easy. We know that such patients are most likely frustrated, and perhaps even upset, about their situation. This is NORMAL . Many health care professionals may have told them that they have to learn to live with the problem. Others may have promised they could fix it. Scientific investigations suggest that such "fix it" approaches do not work for chronic MSP. Rather, we need to approach chronic MSP like asthma or diabetes and learn how to control and cope with it better.

The chronic pain dilemma

• Both, too little or too much activity are equally deleterious.
• Once a chronic pain problem is established it becomes memorized or programmed in the nervous system resulting in greater tissue sensitivity (a lowered pain threshold).
• A famous example of this is "phantom limb pain" which persists long after the leg is amputated.
• This was best described by Janet Travell, MD, the White House Physician for John F. Kennedy, who said "after an injury tissues heal, but muscles learn and they readily develop habits of guarding that long outlasts the injury."

At L.A. Sports & Spine we guide patients step by step through a biomechanically safe program. They learn "first-aid' measures for flare-ups to help them gain confidence in their recovery. Most importantly, we show how to recondition and nourish the tissues so that they can return to activity safely.

Thank you very much for viewing this website. I hope that this scientifically based yet personalized approach to musculoskeletal problems can be of benefit to you.

Sincerely,
Craig Liebenson, D.C.

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