Unfortunately, disease is a common human experience.  And though the expert teams at The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital have fantastic treatments to help you and you’ll receive a lot of encouragement and support from the whole team that is caring for you, it’s still easy to feel helpless and overwhelmed at times. Those feelings add additional stress to your mind and cause your body to tense up.  This is miserable and can slow your healing.  These audio files are designed to help you relax and reduce your stress and pain.  Most patients really enjoy using them.

 The first audio will help you recognise the effect anxiety may be having on your posture and how that affects your breathing – the vital life force that keeps us all alive. It also teaches you the 478 breathing exercise which is fantastic for anxiety.  You may only need to listen to a few times before you have it under your belt and are able to use it in all sorts of situations, from sitting waiting for traffic lights to change, to helping you tolerate an MRI scanner or an aeroplane, to helping you relax and return to sleep if you wake at night. It’s a great Life Hack!

The second audio is for helping you prepare your mind before surgery if you need it, with the goal of reducing your anxiety, having a good outcome from your surgery and healing well afterwards.  It’s best listened to in the several days leading up to surgery and even on the morning of your surgery itself.

The third is guided imagery for patients who may be suffering phantom limb pain after an operation.  It’s also been found to be useful for patients with painful limbs for other reason such as a stroke.  It’s a virtual version of Mirror Therapy which you may have heard of, except you can listen anywhere, in a car, in your bed at night and so on. Moving is often helpful in pain conditions.  Motion is Lotion as they say!  Mirrors and guided imagery are just methods of tricking your brain into thinking that you are moving a limb that you may not be able to move, either because it has been amputated or it is too painful to move.