Reasoning Radiculopathy, Referred pain and Radicular pain: Tom Jesson’s In Touch article.

It’s time for another guest post on the naked physio. On twitter back in June this year I read an interesting thread on types of leg and arm pain. I enjoyed the thread so much I reached out to the physio and asked him to write a blog. He was able to go one step further and kindly shared his article that he wrote for InTouch magazine. Tom Jesson is a physio based in the UK. He is part of the ConnectHealth group and has been closely involved with the recent #BigRs conferences. So, without further ado I’ll hand you over to Tom. 

Earlier this year, I realised I didn’t really know the difference between all these different words for leg pain: radicular pain, radiculopathy, referred pain – oh my! So I decided to sit down one day to work it out, and I tweeted out what I found. To my surprise (and relief!) the thread was quite popular because a lot of other people didn’t really know the difference either!

I was honoured to be asked by the editors of In Touch, the Physio magazine, to expand on the topic and write it up into an article.

Physio is such a diverse profession with so many different ways of approaching even the most common pain presentations. Diversity is part of the profession’s strength, but as long as we are all using different words for the same things, we will find it difficult to make progress. A common, science-based language makes communication more efficient and more effective, not only between ourselves but with patients, too.

The modest goal of my article is to clarify the meaning of the terms radicular pain, radiculopathy, and referred pain, to say a little bit about the underlying pathophysiology, and then to put forward some ideas about how we explain these weird and wonderful pain conditions to our patients.

I think this topic is really interesting and I hope you do, too!

You can access the article by clicking the link below

Radiculopathy, Radicular pain and referred pain article

If you want to read more articles from In Touch you can find them here: https://www.physiofirst.org.uk/resources/in-touch.html