Today’s topic of discussion is pain- because pain can often be the last thing to come yet the first thing to go. It is a massive conversation that we could have but I want to break it down into one simple thing.
There are particular nerves in a body called nociceptors, and these types of nerves sense mechanical pains, chemical pains, and dermal pains plus a few other ones as well.
When your body is ‘hurt’ these nociceptor nerves send information toward the spinal cord and brain. There has to be a certain level of threshold that your body needs before it will register it.
Similar to a computer, if the brain has all this information running to and from, all at the same time, it would be overwhelmed. The brain already has a major job of ensuring you are balanced while standing, breathing, and keeping your heart rate and blood pressure where it needs to be. Your body is constantly juggling all these automatic functions all the same time. If your body just processed every single stimulus that received your brain wouldn’t be able to cope. It has to filter these messages in order of priority, and pain is not a priority if you compare it to heart function or respiration.
This means there can be a lot of underlying things going on before you feel it. We know this as your pain threshold. If you’re judging your health based on how you feel, you could be causing damage underneath.
Some people have a higher pain threshold meaning their body is used to pain, and unfortunately, these people tend to leave their problems long before they get them looked at. So it’s not a good thing to have high pain threshold after all…
It’s no different from teeth, you can’t feel cavities but the longer you leave them, the more likely you are to have a nerve root problem. We know it takes many years for that to occur and we all understand that prevention is better than looking for a cure when it comes to tooth decay.
Now bringing it back to look at the spine! You should be treating your spine exactly like your teeth, if not better than your teeth because you can replace teeth but you can’t replace your spine.
Your spine is the information highway for these messages, going from your body to your body and back and forth in milliseconds. The health of your spine will dictate the health of your nervous system. And your nervous system controls everything in your body.
When I see people coming in for an initial consultation, under careful examination and investigation we find out that their problems were caused years, sometimes decades ago. They wonder how their spine has got to this level of degeneration and commonly ask why they didn’t know about this before…
In these cases, their pain just gradually increased over the years and because it was slow they didn’t notice it. In other words, the body was getting used to the threshold of pain, and every day, the problem was getting worse without knowing.
Ever heard of the phrase “I just learnt to live with it”.
That’s one of my biggest frustrations in practice because by the time somebody can’t live any longer with it they bring it to me and it potentially could be too late. It makes my job harder, and it takes longer to get the results you want because of the severity of the problem.
So my recommendation is don’t judge your health by how you feel, judge it by how it functions.
In our office, we do regular re-examinations because it’s the function of the body, it was that will tell us how it’s REALLY doing.
If you want the best for your health, and want to prevent problems from happening in the future, Let’s get you checked regularly as prevention is better than cure.
If you have an injury please just don’t treat it with pain medication, get it checked properly by your health professional so you can treat it correctly and restore your body to its original health.
If you have any questions regarding this by all means please contact our office or send a message and we’ll be sure to do our best to help you out.
Watch this week’s Chiro Couch on our YouTube channel linked below