Did You Know Pain is Not What’s Causing Your Issues?
What an interesting world it would be if we didn’t feel pain. Many of us think that sounds like a little slice of heaven but the reality is, pain is a great thing- in a poor functioning system. Pain is our body’s natural way of communicating with us that something isn’t operating as it should, aka dysfunction.
Karel Lewit, a renowned physiotherapist, was quoted as saying “He who treats the sight of pain is lost”. That being said, the #1 reason people seek care from a provider (allopathic or alternative) is pain. It is important to realize that pain is just a side-effect of the main issue.
Pain is a sensation produced by our brain to alert the body that something is causing it harm or potentially could cause harm. This sensation can come in the form of physical- aching, stabbing, throbbing, sharp- or emotional- distress, tears, panic. Pain itself and sensory symptoms as a whole do not cause structural symptoms.
Structural symptoms are also side effects of the main issue. Examples of structural symptoms would be arthritis, bone spurring, tendonitis, or disc herniations/bulges.
Just as with pain, these issues are symptoms, aka derived from another pathology that leads our body to become aware something isn’t functioning well and eventually starts to break things down. If pain and structural symptoms aren’t our main issues, this begs the question of what truly is dysfunction?
In the musculoskeletal world, examples of dysfunction might include:
Muscle imbalance- When a muscle is too tight, it is also going to be inhibited from firing and therefore present as weak. This weakness leads to other muscles in the body being overworked or fatigued. In office, a common complaint is knee pain. If someone’s left hip/gluteal muscles are weak and tight it will cause the individual to shift their weight with each step onto the right knee and overuse or fatigue the muscles and knee joint, leading towards the sensation of pain. If we only worked on that person’s right knee and never addressed the left hip, the issue would never fully resolve.
Joint Restriction- When a joint cannot fully move through its range of motion, our body compensates for the lack of movement in the joints above and below it. I will often hear patients say they feel like they need to “pop” their neck to relieve discomfort they feel. When they do, the discomfort is better, but they feel like they must do it again. This is because they are only creating movement at a joint above or below the dysfunction but not actually where things are restricted.
The next time you feel pain or the next time you are presented with a structural issue like tightness in a muscle, think to yourself; am I addressing the root cause of my issue or just noticing symptoms? If your pain is not resolving and your function is not improving, give Optimal Performance Center a call to locate and treat the root cause.
