Living with Chronic Pain?

ACUTE PAIN is a new severe attack of pain usually in response to an injury or illness, for instance straining a muscle or sports injury. It can be shocking or disconcerting when acute pain strikes for the first time. It’s usually due to a trauma, such as a fast sprint without warming up or, an underlying disease but it often resolves after a short period of time. PHEW! You’ll be pleased to know acute pain is short lived and lasts less than 6 months.

Acute pain “serves a useful biologic purpose”, meaning it tells us not to repeat what we did to cause the injury. If we touch a hot surface and burn our skin, the pain teaches us to not to touch the hot surface again. We learn from it. If a fast sprint caused a muscle strain, in future, we make sure we warm-up our bodies before performing an intense workout. Acute pain is a clever feedback mechanism.

The most commonly encountered type of pain that does not resolve and is often seen in chiropractic or physiotherapy practice is CHRONIC PAIN.

CHRONIC PAIN usually lasts longer than 3 months and is ongoing, despite medical intervention. At best, these interventions such as NSAIDs or muscle relaxants only provide short-term relief and mask the problem. They cannot be relied upon for long-term use due to the high risk of side effects or reliance.

Firstly, it’s a long, hard slog! Chronic pain can wear you down. It consumes the hours of your day and requires a lot of energy. Dealing with chronic pain can alter your mood and fatigue your body. Imagine training for a marathon wearing one shoe. It will be much harder work, put increased stress on your body and certainly make you ache in muscles that you never knew existed!

Similar to the effects that training for a marathon has upon your body, the body is also extremely clever when adapting to chronic pain. Your body learns to adapt and compensate. Adaptation can help to keep you going for longer but eventually, you can irritate other joints, muscles or tendons by compensating for too long. There is a limited amount of adaptation that can happen before your body sends more warning signals to tell you that something definitely needs to change. Here the PAIN signal will become more severe and grow louder and…. louder and….. louder.

Eventually like ‘hitting the wall’ in a marathon. You will feel like you can’t go on, as the physical pain and mental suffering, is all too much.

When your body and mental state has become accustomed to the drain of chronic pain, it has ‘trained’ itself to function in a particular way to complete your daily activities. You have learnt to adapt to your body working badly and compensation becomes a habit. Even though it is exhausting, someone living with chronic pain is like a marathon runner training in one shoe. They adapt well to an ongoing challenge.

This is where we (as chiropractors or physical therapists) come in to help. Once, your body has had enough or you ‘hit the wall’, you need to CHANGE.

First and foremost, you have to change your mind. Think differently. A change of mind allows for new ideas and opportunities to arise, which bring about new solutions. As Einstein says “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

If you decide to wear a decent pair of running trainers and hydrate, you can smash through that wall and finish the marathon. If you choose to change NOTHING, then nothing new will happen and you won’t finish the race. Just as, if you ignore chronic pain, it will continue to play on loop.

Importantly, recognise that there is no quick fix.

In 12 years, I am yet to witness a one-stop wonder that can instantly take pain away and keep it away. Like training for a marathon, there is no easy way of doing it. You need the ‘time on feet’ and groundwork to make it successful. Similarly, chronic pain needs to be dealt with over time, to gradually decrease inflammation, encourage healing and to rebuild and strengthen. A sustainable gradual change over time helps to increase fitness and decrease pain levels.

Seeing a chiropractor helps to naturally break the chronic pain cycle. Your body has to learn new habits and be guided into an easier and less stressful way of functioning. This doesn’t happen overnight but is a steady road to recovery.

So, why do I NOT ask my patients after every visit “How are you feeling?”

The same reason a personal trainer doesn’t ask if after each gym session “You feel fitter yet?”

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Your body has the tools to mend and repair itself; it just needs the guidance to do so.