What Is Pain Made Of ?

Mar

7

Regardless of whether you have back pain, hip pain, knee pain or neck pain, regardless of whether you choose to see a chiropractor, an osteopath or a physiotherapist knowledge is power.

The better we understand our pain and the clearer our thinking about pain the better chance we have of the win in the longer term. With that in mind lets just back up for a moment and ask what pain is !?

YOUR BODY IS MADE UP OF 3 DEPARTMENTS

CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT

This is the part of your body that our clever doctors usually tinker with in order to help us back to full health. It is also the part that you like to improve when you go on a healthy eating kick for example. Molecules, peptides, enzymes, nutrients and hormones make up the bodies tissues and fluid. But this is only one of the bodies major systems.

MECHANICAL

Bones – joints – muscles – tendons and connective tissue are all the stuff of movement and actually make up the vast bulk of your mass outside your belly. This part of us needs love and we know that because we have gym memberships and Zumba habits. When we have normal type back pain, neck pain , hip pain and sometimes even headaches we are receiving messages that relate to injury and movement problems in this part of the body.

ELECTRICAL DEPARTMENT ( Elephant in the Room)

So the nervous system ( electrical body ) is the big kahuna and yet the one we least often discuss. Yet fundamentally every single twitch of every cell in your body is based on tiny little electrical pulses it’s the very basis of life.

When you eat a cheese burger your brain tells your jaw to chop it up… then the necessary digestive enzymes are pumped by tiny muscles fired by nerve impulses – the food is pushed through your gut by muscles that are also directed by their nerve impulses.

If you are unfortunate enough to find your hormonal system goes into chaos once a month it is the nerves and brain that set off the molecular firework display.

When you lift a dumbbell its the nerves that have to fire before the muscle contracts.

When a mosquito bites you its nerve that dilate the blood vessels… etc etc ….. Do you get the picture ?

All that laid out its easy for us to see that what back pain, neck pain etc. are made of is ‘electrical department’ signals fired off by messages within the bodies ‘mechanical department’ and interpreted deep inside the brain ( electrical department again) . These facts are among the many reasons why I would submit it makes little or no sense to manage pain long term by tinkering with the chemistry department … also known as pill popping.

In any case understanding our pain and what it is made if is only one small step towards the real end game of being pain free and feeling good. For me even being pain free isn’t the deepest level of the game. The deepest level of the game and the whole reason I do what I do is FREEDOM ! Freedom to do all the things we have to do and all the things we enjoy doing, freedom to not be constantly trying to figure out why we are sore and sometimes even the freedom to be able to sit, walk and sleep comfortably. Thats the juice we squeeze out of learning this stuff.