We’ve been led astray when it comes to understanding our own bodies. And, to make things worse, many healthcare providers do not understand some things.
Where you experience pain is not the location of the problem the vast majority of the time. Sometimes the pain is referred from somewhere else. For example pain or numbness radiating into the arm is most often coming from nerve pressure and irritation in the neck.
Did you know that a common symptom of a heart attack is pain radiating into the left arm? Yet, the problem is not in the arm but the heart.
When you sustain an injury – a car accident, a fall, a lifting injury – the pain is often coming from the injured tissues.
But, that is often not the case…
UNDERSTANDING COMPENSATIONS AND ADAPTATIONS
The human body is continually striving to maintain balance or homeostasis. It does this chemically with your blood ph. It is always attempting to match your heart rate and blood pressure to the conditions you are in and your activity level.
When the body is forced out of balance it will attempt to regain balance. When possible it does this by correcting the imbalance. When that is not possible it does this by compensating in some way to achieve greater balance.
It is often the attempts at greater balance that cause the neck or lower back pain. In other words the compensations often result in pain over time.
STRUCTURAL COMPENSATIONS CAUSE PAIN
Let’s illustrate this with a common example that I see in my practice, Life Chiropractic of Grass Valley, very frequently.
We’ll use low back pain as the complaint that brings someone into me. Someone comes in with right sided lower back pain radiating into their right hip.
They’ve been to their medical doctor who ordered x-rays and told them they have hip arthritis. They were referred to an orthopedic doctor who offered to give them a hip injection.
On examination I found some restriction of the right hip joint and a misalignment and loss of motion of their left pelvic or sacroiliac joint. The restriction of the left SI or sacroiliac joint over time put additional stress on the right SI joint in an attempt to compensate for the loss of motion on the left side.
This also put additional stress on the right hip joint because every step they took, the left side was not moving properly and this made the right side work extra hard.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE
A few months ago a woman came to see me for her neck pain. She was having a hard time turning her head side to side and was in pain daily and had been for a long time.
What I found and adjusted for her over a period of weeks was her upper back. As her upper back loosened up, so did her neck. I barely had to touch her neck to help her experience over 90% improvement in her neck pain.
FIND THE CAUSE
The point of this story is that it is essential to find what is causing a problem if you want to correct the problem. Taking tylenol or ibuprofen for a headache might give you relief from the headache but it isn’t addressing the cause of your headache. You don’t have a deficiency of tylenol. You are simply shutting down the pain signal.
By correcting the primary imbalance it often results in an immediate correction of the compensations causing the pain. Often, the pain is accompanied by inflammation that will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to resolve.
Remember, your body is continually striving to achieve and maintain balance. When it can’t return to balance it will compensate for the imbalance in an attempt to achieve as much balance as possible.
About Dr. Berkowitz
Bringing more than 3 decades of practice experience, Dr. Bill Berkowitz focuses on balancing and corrective care, applying his expertise to provide patients with predictable, repeatable and measurable results.
Dr. Bill consistently strives to enhance the well-being of his patients by addressing the root imbalances of their problems and promoting optimal balance, alignment, and function of the spine and nervous system.
Bill’s wealth of knowledge and experience has allowed him to develop a nuanced understanding of the human body and its intricate connections. With each adjustment, he supports the body in returning to a state of balance that goes beyond mere symptom relief, focusing instead on long-term correction for his patients’ well-being.
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