A lot of people come into my office thinking pain is the problem. The first thing they request is to help them get rid of the pain. Pain, as hard as it may seem, is really not what I see as the main problem. Pain is our bodies way of telling us that something is wrong and it helps to initiate change. It is understandable that pain is most people’s first priority. Pain is a GREAT motivator, but we have to address the dysfunction in the body that is creating the pain.
If you go to the doctor and get medication to help stop the pain all that does is cover up the problem and leave the dysfunction. When pain is covered up all it does is allow the body to keep breaking down further. If we catch the message from the body early and listen to it we can actually do productive things to make it function better. Pain is our bodies way of telling us “hey you’re working too hard” or “hey you’re eating foods that cause inflammation.” If you ignore these messages and just pop a pill then the underlying causes will get worse until you need some drastic intervention like surgery or you develop a serious disease.
A lot of the time I hear from patients as they are getting better than the intense 9 out of 10 pain they came in with is feeling so much better and now it “only hurts like normal.” Have you ever experienced pain for a prolonged period of time that your body just got used to a certain level of pain or discomfort? Any type of pain is not normal! Pain is your body trying to tell you that something is not right.
It is really unique how our body tries to communicate with us. It starts off by giving us subtle clues like maybe a headache or an upset stomach. Just small uncomfortable things start to happen to warn you that something in your environment is not agreeing with your body. Our typical response to our body when this happens is to ignore it. Because guess what? We are really busy and we have kids to take care of, a job to do, and all these responsibilities. So we tell our body to just be quiet and stop bothering us. In the beginning, our body normally listens and uses its own stress mechanisms to cover up the problem.
What happens next is our body starts talking a little louder “HEY you! I’ve got a problem and you need to do something about it.” This can show up in so many different forms but maybe instead of a headache, it turns into a migraine or instead of a stomach ache it turns into more digestive discomfort. Maybe other things start to go wrong; you break out in a rash, you get sick, your joints start to ache whatever it may be your pain level has now increased. When this happens we start to talk back to our body just as loud. We tell it to TOUGHEN UP because we have a life to live! We can’t be dealing with these problems right now we have too much other crap going on. And our body listens to us.
Then our body starts yelling! “HEY, YOU! I HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM.” Maybe your migraine turns into chronic migraines or your stomach ache turns into chronic constipation or diarrhea. Your body has all these fun ways of causing us pain and discomfort to try to get our attention. This is when we bring out the big guns. We go to the kitchen and grab the NSAIDS like the Tylenol and acetaminophen to help with the pain. Maybe we go to the medical doctors and get some other pain pills that are stronger. At this point, we are telling our body “I don’t even care about you.”
Finally, as a last resort, our body pulls out a 2×4 hits us over the head and takes us down! At this point, we are no longer functional. We can’t work, socialize, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, and we are in so much excruciating pain. That is when you will finally come in and see me and say “I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden I picked something up off the ground or ate this one thing I always eat or did some other mediocre thing and BAM now I’m in all this pain.” Rarely is there one defining moment when people can point out to me exactly when it went wrong. If they can then it’s likely they have an acute problem and medicine works wonderfully for that. If you can sit there and tell me that you have no idea when exactly it went wrong you’ve just been living with this problem. Then let me tell you, my friend, it is a chronic health issue, and that I can definitely help with.
The thing is your body has been telling you something’s wrong for a long time and in all different kinds of ways, but we have gotten so good at ignoring our bodies. You only really paid attention when your body finally took you out and you couldn’t function normally.
Pain is there for us in all these subtle ways, and we have to get better at listening to our body instead of telling it to shut up because we are tough. You know the saying “the straw that broke the camel’s back” well, it really was a straw. That is often how chronic health problems arise it was one little thing that finally broke you after months or years of dysfunction.
