 What Is Pain?
Why is it that some people feel more pain than others and what is a pain threshold and how does that differ between each individual person?
As Chiropractors, we see people in pain a lot of the time when they come to visit us. Our job is to get them out of pain. But not only that. To allow them to function, move and get back to doing what they love to do but cannot because of the pain.
These goals could be as simple as walking down the stairs, getting dressed pain free, putting a bra on without pain, sleeping better or sitting comfortably at their desk. For others, it may be going for a long walk, jogging, or getting back to some physical activity,
The important thing to remember is that for each individual person, their goal is different from someone else’s, and pain is different.
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How do you rate pain?
You could ask 10 different people to grade their pain on a scale of one to ten. Ten being the highest and zero being no pain whatsoever. Then if you emitted an electric shock, the same voltage to every single one of them. You would get different readings for each person.
Pain is a feeling that travels in the nerves and causes a reaction to happen in our body. It is a useful sensation as it protects us from danger and allows us to move away from a hazard. The most common historical term for this is “fight and flight”. If we felt something that hurt us the immediate response is to move away from it.
If you feel pain, your body goes into a fight/flight mechanism. A sympathetic response would evolve, will take the blood away from our nonessential organs, for example digestive organs, the excretion organs and will funnel the blood towards our heart, our lungs, so we can function at a higher level.
There are three components to chronic pain. We as Chiropractors, we deal a lot with structural pain, physical pain. This is where there’s something physically wrong with the body.
For example a bone out of place, a disc prolapse, a tight muscle, which is causing physical pain in that person and that can affect the mobility. We’re very good at addressing physical pain and getting the body back in the best position.
The second component of pain is chemical stress. So what are we putting in our bodies? Are we drinking too much? Are we smoking? Are we eating the right foods? Do we have a balanced diet with high vegetable, high protein, low carbs, low white, starchy foods? Keeping the body as alkaline as possible will cause this to be in a good chemical state.
When you drink alcohol, eat bad food, you will often find that the pain is worse. So if you’re already struggling with physical pain and a structural issue then having a poor diet will not benefit the body long term.
Do emotions make pain worse?
The third component of pain is emotional pain. When we’ve had an emotional trauma in our life like losing someone close to us, losing a job, a divorce, a breakup, it’s going to cause an emotional stress response in the body. That can affect pain as well.
The most common form of this is on a Friday evening after a long and stressful week at work. Sometimes when it has been stressful, we will feel pain across their shoulders and neck and the stress will exacerbate the issue of the pain.
It’s really important that we can address all three of these areas by providing good, healthy lifestyle advice for diet but also making our clients aware that there is more than one component of pain and that the emotional side and looking after our mental health is important as well.
We are not psychologists. We can advise on taking regular exercise, to help the mental health and practicing techniques like headspace, talking therapies. If you do find that you have a severe emotional trauma, it’s best to seek professional help. If we can help by talking you through any different types of pain you work with and how you deal with these different pains, please let us know
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