How many times have you found yourself sitting with low back, neck, or shoulder pain when completing your charts? 

Did you ever think to yourself, "ugh i need to work on my posture?"

Well here is some good news, your static posture is not to blame for your aches and pains. Your lack of movement is. 

You see, we have praised a "perfect posture" for way too long. Thoughts of sit up straight, shoulders back, chest up. It's painful even listening to it. But when we really think about it, how good for our body is it really?

The truth is, not good at all. Especially for a Dental Professional. Here's why?

Any clinical patient encounter in the world of dentistry is going to require an awkward position to get deep inside someones chops. Let's say you are right handed. You probably position yourself to the right hand side of the patient, dip your left shoulder down and hike your right shoulder up and forward to get to work. 

In orthopedic terms, this requires a Left thoracic side bend, and Right thoracic rotation, Right scapular upward rotation, and a lot of shoulder flexion and Internal rotation. 

What this medical jargon means is, your shoulder blades and thoracic spine need to be freely moveable in the opposite direction of the "traditional" shoulders back and down posture. 

This means, the traditional thoughts about posture are heavily tilted out of your favor. If you subscribe to the traditional posture thoughts, its going to be far more difficult and energy spending for you to get inside someones mouth, than if you didn't think about posture at all!

Let's say you've been treating your patients all day, and you get that pain going from shoulder blade, traps, and back of your neck. If you thought it was your posture and start trying to sit your shoulder back, down, and upright. You are actually making your symptoms worse in the long run. 

Kind of crazy, right?!

So, at this point you're probably asking....What should i do for my pain. 

Well, our bodies change in crazy ways in response to the forces put through it...throwback to Newton's Law's about equal and opposite reactions. No two people are going to have the exact same posture, but we have identified 4 types of postures that severely hinder a Dental Professionals clinical performance because of pain. 

So what are we waiting for, click the button below to schedule your first pain relief consultation, where your PT can identify your specific dental postural pattern and give you the exact program you need to fix it for good!