Hey, look at that title I just made up a new medical term đ.
At The Reinge Clinic we sometimes spend as much time demystifying things that clients have been told they have, as we do treating them.
Various conditions carry various terms, and whilst this is useful between medical professionals, it can be about as helpful as a chocolate teapot (unless you are hungryđ) to everybody else. To further complicate the matter medical terms tend to be derived from Greek and Latin đ¤Ż, which was not on the school curriculum at the last check.
So lets look at some two common terms and what they mean:
Firstly lets look at "itis" :
Itis simply means inflammation. So, now life gets easy, all we do is put the body part in front of it:
- Tendonitis = Inflammation of a tendon, and of course we can get more specific...'Achilles tendonitis'.
- Bursitis = Inflammation of a Bursa. How easy is this?.... Lets try another:
- Arthritis = Inflammation of the Arth!!!!!....................What!? đ¤
Sometimes the word preceding 'Itis' is yet another medical term!
"Arthro" is used to indicate a Joint. It usually appears within the conditions name as "arth". So now we have (in English) Joint inflammation, exactly what arthritis is.
Secondly: "Pathy".
"Pathy". (Derived from the Greek for suffering) is used to indicate a disorder/disease of a part of the body. It's often used when the exact issue has not yet been diagnosed. So let's give it a go:
- Tendonopathy = disorder of a tendon.
- Nueropathy = disorder of a nerve.
- Arthropathy = ...................................................Aha! ......I bet you got it that time đ.
Of course you can look all this up on line these days, so why does it matter to know it? Well any soft tissue/muscular problem that involves the term "itis" will respond very well to ice to help control the inflammation, and perhaps more importantly, will respond terribly to heat, which will increase the inflammation even more.
The take home message for this blog is: Do not put heat on itis and if you have a something ..opathy, then its not yet a diagnosed condition, it's an observation that something is wrong.
If you need guidelines on safe and effective icing Gina did a blog 'to ice or not to ice' in Oct 2017 which you will find on the blog list.
Next week I am gong to take a look at Achilles issues.