Physiotherapist Laura Delgaty is quickly settling into her new job at the Posture and Pain Centre, helping relieve patients of chronic pain as well as providing therapy for osteoporosis and diabetes.

"Chronic pain and chronic disorders are the areas we're going to be focusing on," said Miss Delgaty who arrived in Bermuda last month from Ontario, Canada.

"For those two conditions (osteoporosis and diabetes) we will be looking to focus on exercise and stretching to slow down the disease process, and in chronic pain conditions, like Fibrositis, we will be looking at aerobic activity, modalities, for example acupuncture or TENS, and education."

Miss Delgaty is a member of the Canadian Diabetes Education Counsel and the Osteoporosis Society of Canada.

"I have worked a lot with first nations people (Canadian Indians) where there are high incidents of both diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis," she explained.

"With both those chronic conditions we know that certain exercises can help regulate them, as with osteoporosis. I have a Masters of Education so we also are going to be doing some group work on chronic conditions and chronic pain.

"One of our goals with chronic pain is to decrease the focus on pain and increase the focus on function and independence. Some of the conditions, for sure, will affect the elderly, but often with chronic pain there are very few treatment options.

"Chronic pain is an area which I don't think is very well addressed in medicine. We don't really understand pain and chronic pain just leads to other problems like sleep disorders, time off from work and chemical dependencies, depression and all those things can be secondary to chronic pain.

"Our goal is to provide people with an option if they have exhausted everything else. There is something called chronic pain syndrome where people are in pain all the time and don't understand why.

"We know that the modalities we use help control pain and we know that aerobic activity help release natural endorphins, like a natural painkiller. So by doing aerobic activity and modalities it is a non-pharmaceutical way to help treat chronic pain...without taking drugs and having side effects."

In her short time on the Island Miss Delgaty has already seen a lot of chronic neck pain and postural problems and lower back pain.

"And for sure high incidents of diabetes," she says.

So how does physiotherapy work with diabetes?

"We know that exercise helps regulate glucose levels and improves circulation," she explained.

"We look at foot care in diabetics and in the complications of diabetes we look at amputations and prosthesis. There are two kinds of diabetes, type II diabetes usually affects older people and type I (juvenile diabetes) affects younger people."

Educating people about proper posture can help eliminate long term problems.

"We will also take a look at someone's workplace to make sure their computer is at the right level or the desk is at the right level - little things that are not hard to change, but make a big difference," Miss Delgaty stressed.

`Posture is the cause of neck or back pain. Women often suffer chronic pain more than men and it is not very well addressed.

"With the chronic pain programme we are setting up, ideally it will be a six week programme and they will have to come three times a week. In that programme we would do pain control, focus on aerobic activity and do education classes.

"The individuals will have to keep a journal and independently record all their activities. So they will have to be motivated to come often and log their pain, their function as well as their activity. Pain is such a subjective thing it is hard to measure."

Miss Delgaty ran a chronic pain clinic at the Sioux Lookout Hospital in northern Ontario prior to coming to Bermuda.

"We also had people with mental illnesses there, people either suicidal or depressed who had to come and do aerobic activity and keep track of what they were doing and who really had positive results," she revealed.