Chronic pain interferes with every aspect of life. It affects your ability to be your best in every area of your life from family to friends to work to recreation. It impacts your emotional health and often leads to depression and substance abuse.
If you suffer from chronic pain you are not alone! According to the CDC 1 in 5 Americans Suffer with Chronic Pain.
Research shows that more than 50 million US adults report pain on most days or every day.
It’s clear that the traditional medical approach is not working. The opioid epidemic is evidence that addictive painkillers need to be used with great caution. You can’t simply cover up the pain long term and not attempt to change the underlying cause.
The medical journal Demography reported that Chronic Pain is getting Substantially Worse. That should come as no surprise as there is a direct relationship between pain and stress for those with chronic nerve pain.
That all sounds dire, from the problems with pain medications to the increasing number of American adults experiencing daily pain. It’s pretty clear that our approach to treating and managing chronic pain is not working.
If You Want Different Results….then Do Different!
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
That quote is attributed to the genius Albert Einstein. It makes sense to me yet within the medical approach to chronic pain is the tendency to repeat treatments that have poor long term results and have inherent dangers, such as addiction to medications.
Most pain treatment understandably focuses on the pain but too often that is where the treatment stops. Pain has many facets and impacts every aspect of life. It’s time to take a more whole body approach to pain in an effort to support the body in what it does best, maintain balance and heal.
What about doing differently in a way that supports the body and has very little risk of dangerous side effects? That should be the first line approach to dealing with pain. In my experience this can prevent the development of chronic pain as well as markedly reduce the severity and frequency of pain without medication, surgery, or injections.
What is different from the standard approach?
The human body is an amazing feat of engineering. We tend to overlook 3 very unique characteristics of the body that we can use to solve the chronic pain puzzle. They are:
- The body is self-monitoring: it is continually tracking hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions and states in the body from blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, breathing rate, inflammation, digestion, and much, much more.
- The body is self-regulating: All of the reactions and functions that are being monitored are continually regulated to keep the body in balance.
- The body is self-healing: All healing comes from within the body. Sometimes we need to offer support like in setting a bone fracture or controlling a bacterial infection. But, make no mistake that the cast or antibiotic did not do the healing. The body does the healing.
Before we go any further make sure to check out a few social media posts I’ve made on pain after you have finished this article.
How to Flip the Switch on Your Pain
The 3 Pieces to Solving Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is complex and the longer you have experienced the pain the more complex it gets. The body is always attempting to return to balance but sometimes those attempts at a return to balance result in another aspect of imbalance. Over time this results in compensations on top of compensations, that further perpetuates the pain.
There are a wide range of therapeutic approaches depending on each individual. What I want to share with you are the foundational 3 pieces that I have found are essential to shifting the chronic pain puzzle.
Critical Piece #1: Structural Balance. As I’ve said your body is forever striving for homeostasis or balance. This applies to your internal chemical balance from pH to blood sugar to enzymes to hormones and neurotransmitters and more.
It also applies to your physical structure. Here’s how to check this out on yourself. You can do this yourself but it is easier with an assistant.
Stand in front of a full length or bathroom mirror wearing minimal to no clothing from the waist up. Look at the top of your hips or pelvis. This works best if an assistant puts their hands on top of each side. Is one side of your pelvis higher than the other? For most this imbalance will be more than an inch.
Now move up to the shoulders and evaluate if one shoulder is higher than the other.
Lastly, look at your head. The easiest reference point is your ear lobes. You can also look to the outside corner of your eyes. This is often a bit more subtle than the pelvis but you will likely find an imbalance.
If you have a bench do the same assessment sitting. When you sit down the imbalances often get dramatically worse. This is because the body is doing its best to use the leverage of the legs to create as much balance as possible. When you sit down you remove your legs from the equation and what you get is the structural imbalances that the body is unable to compensate for.
Critical Piece #2: Spinal Joint Balance and Motion. This is related to number one but involves more. Pain is experienced through your nervous system. It is essential to remove as much tension and interference from the nervous system if you are going to be successful in solving your chronic pain. A few areas are critical to reducing as much pain as possible.
- Upper Cervical Spine: the upper neck is home to the brainstem which houses the control center for most body functions. Imbalance here causes an overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system that results in increased muscle tension, increased inflammation, impaired sleep, impaired recovery and healing, poor digestion and more.
- Mid and Lower Cervical Spine: the cervical spine should have a curve that goes forward. When you lose mobility in the neck you lose the curve and start to develop degenerative arthritis. This process makes any chronic pain condition worse and develops more pain.
- Pelvis: your pelvis is the structural foundation of your spine and nervous system. If it is not level and not moving properly the stress and imbalance causes problems from the pelvis to the head.
The focus of my chiropractic care is to correct imbalances and restore proper motion to the spine, which houses the vast majority of the nerves that innervate the entire body. A loss of motion will produce an increase in pain. The imbalance causes improper motion and results in accelerated wear and tear of the joints of the spine.
Critical Piece #3: Autonomic Nervous System Balance. The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) controls the vast majority of body functions that take place without your conscious involvement. This includes breathing, digestion, heart rate, hormones, sleep, blood flow and much more.
The ANS has two primary divisions:
- Sympathetic ‘Fight-or-Flight’ Nervous System: the SNS is the part of the nervous system that gets over activated during periods of prolonged stress. It can be a large part of the cause of pain but it is always a factor in the perpetuation and exacerbation of pain.
Over time chronic activation of the SNS causes this to be your default nervous system state. This is the stress response survival part of your nervous system. It should not be active the majority of the time.
When overactivated the Sympathetic Nervous System can cause:
- Increased muscle tension and pain
- Increased inflammation resulting in increased pain
- Disturbed and impaired sleep causing greater pain
- Impaired digestion impacting nutrition and health
- Impaired healing and recovery further exacerbating pain
- Much, much more….
Parasympathetic Nervous System or Vagus Nerve: this has commonly been referred to as the ‘Rest and Digest’ portion of the nervous system. The Vagus Nerve has been called the foundation of wellness. When the Sympathetic Nervous System gets activated it causes a reduction in the activity of the Vagus Nerve.
The Vagus Nerve is involved in everything you need to solve your chronic pain puzzle. If you don’t take measures to improve Vagus Nerve activity you will likely experience a progressive worsening of your chronic pain.
Those are what I have found to be the ‘3 Critical Pieces to Solving the Chronic Pain Puzzle’. Any other treatment approaches will be less effective without addressing structural balance, spinal joint motion, and the Autonomic Nervous System.
Chronic pain tends to become self-perpetuating. Pain tends to limit movement in an effort to protect oneself and experience less pain. However that tends to reduce mobility which causes more pain. The stress and pain causes activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System which results in more pain. And the cycle goes on and on.
My clinical focus is on interrupting that cycle and bringing greater balance to the body and the nervous system.
Make sure to subscribe to my social media channels where I regularly post tips, insights and practices to help you.
Facebook: Life Chiropractic Facebook
YouTube: Life Chiropractic YouTube
Instagram: Life Chiropractic Instagram
To schedule an appointment with me use the scheduling link on my site Life Chiropractic