Body mapping study suggests chronic pain comes in nine distinct types
At the time Covid lockdown started, my entire foot had become inflamed, and I couldn’t walk on it.  It’s happened before, doctors, physiotherapists and immune specialists couldn’t find a disease or condition to blame it on. They could only offer pain killers and anti-inflammatory meds.  It passed, as it has before.  One thought was overuse, or some reinjury from the past.<p>I happened to find a personal trainer that was educated by osteopaths and the last year with him has been shocking.  In my mind, I didn’t have any pain issues, though some areas were stiff, getting things from lower cabinets was becoming a chore, and the end of the day at work the back of my head and neck would get stiff.  A cocktail or beer could solve the latter.<p>It has been over a year of discoveries.  It turns out, muscles all over my body were very tight, for whatever reason, many major movements were no longer using the major muscle, but instead the brain had recruited minor muscles for the movement - perhaps a compensation for a past injury.  I’ve learned that I have psoas muscles, and how to use them (though that journey continues) and that pinching feeling in my hip no longer happens when I am sitting.<p>I was already aware that so many things happen in our bodies that we aren’t conscious of, but the depth of it now astounds me.  First, I did have pain and problems, but I had somehow shut off awareness.  Second, all of those problems were being still having the effect of making me feel tired and worn down.  Third, all of these compensatory movements that the brain does all by itself were probably great for simple survival because they allow us to keep going even though the best way to move is lost.  Thing is, the brain doesn’t seem to have an automatic ‘service restoration to primary’.  We have to do it consciously, intentionally, and with practice.<p>Pain is in the mind.  There can be pain where there is no physical problem, and there can be no pain where there is a serious problem, but there can also be pain because we have lost awareness of our body and so pain manifests all over the place.  There is an idea that the mind and body are separate, this is wrong and the idea needs to be burned with fire.  Until then, people will continue fighting with these phantoms.  We can group pain together, slice it apart, but I think that in many cases there isn’t much more to learn from pain, except that in many cases it is a symptom of a body trying to communicate to a mind that stopped paying attention.