Last time I wrote:
Pain tells us something needs addressing.
It just doesn’t always tell us what or where.
Which raises an obvious question.
Why not?
Why would pain appear in one place if the main problem can sometimes be somewhere else?
I have a theory about this.
And it helped me make sense of a lot of things that had confused me for years.
Maybe pain isn’t primarily there to show us where the problem is.
Maybe its job is much simpler.
To change our behaviour.
Think about what happens when something hurts.
We move differently.
We avoid certain movements.
We lift less.
We walk differently.
We slow down.
We stop doing the thing that keeps aggravating it.
Pain is remarkably effective at changing what we do.
And that matters if somewhere in the body is already under too much strain.
The brain does not necessarily need to tell us:
"This exact joint, muscle or nerve pathway is the main problem."
It may simply need to get us to behave differently enough to reduce the load.
Imagine something in the lower back is under excessive strain.
Pain could appear in the back.
Or the hip.
Or the leg.
Wherever it appears, the result may be similar.
We change the way we move.
We reduce what we are doing.
We start protecting ourselves.
From that point of view, the pain has done its job.
It changed our behaviour.
It did not need to give us a map.
That idea also helps explain something else I used to find very strange.
Often pain improves when something is addressed nowhere near where it hurts.
At first, that seems illogical.
But if pain is mainly there to change behaviour rather than point directly at anatomy, it starts to make much more sense.
The painful area gets our attention.
The behaviour changes.
The overloaded area gets less load.
That may be all the brain needed from the pain.
This is still my theory based on what I have observed clinically.
But it explains one of the biggest puzzles I had as a physio.
Why can pain be so important,
yet sometimes so poor at showing us what actually needs addressing?
Perhaps because we have been asking pain to do a job it was never designed to do.
Pain gets our attention.
Pain changes our behaviour.
And that can help protect whatever the brain is trying to protect.
Pain may not be trying to show us the problem.
It may be trying to stop us making the problem worse. 👊
