Today's topic is about what our pains are really trying to tell us.
Have you ever wondered why pain can be so inconsistent?
One day it is bad.
Another day it settles.
Sometimes something small sets it off.
Other times we do much more and get away with it.
One thing I think is worth understanding is that
pain is there because our brain has decided something needs addressing.
That makes sense.
If something is wrong,
we want a system that gets our attention.
The harder question is
what exactly needs addressing?
We naturally look at the painful area.
Back pain means the back.
Knee pain means the knee.
Shoulder pain means the shoulder.
Sometimes that is where the main problem is.
But sometimes it isn’t.
That was one of the biggest things I had to unlearn as a standard physio.
I started testing much more widely through the body.
And sometimes something surprising happened.
A painful area improved after addressing something somewhere else.
A muscle that kept grabbing suddenly let go.
Movement became easier.
Pain changed.
Sometimes immediately.
That made one thing increasingly clear to me.
Pain can tell us very clearly that something needs addressing, without necessarily telling us exactly what or where.
And once we understand that,
some of the strange behaviour of pain starts to make more sense.
Why pain can change quickly.
Why it can flare without an obvious new injury.
Why the painful area can sometimes move.
Why something can improve much faster than damaged tissue could possibly heal.
The pain is still real.
It still matters.
But it is only one part of the information our body is giving us.
For me, that became a much more useful way to think about pain.
Instead of asking only:
"What is wrong where it hurts?"
I became much more interested in find out,
"What is our body protecting against, and what actually changes that protection?"
That is often where the useful information begins.
And if there is one idea worth remembering, it is this
Pain tells us something needs addressing.
It just doesn’t always tell us what or where. 👊
