No pain no gain, toughen-up, you can handle the pain. Our culture and language is built on the idea that stronger people should somehow endure pain. We can tell you that, while persistent or chronic pain is becoming more common, putting-up with it won’t get you anywhere and may just make things worse.
Before we look into pain relief, it’s important to know that pain isn’t actually a bad thing. We know it isn’t fun and tends to suck a lot of the joy out of life, but pain in itself has a key physiological role.
Your body’s warning you that something’s up, and it’s super important not to ignore it!
Nerves are everywhere. They form a really complex map relaying signals from every part of the body to the brain by entering and leaving the spine at various levels.
When a certain pathway is over stimulated, it will keep firing these signals which could be perceived as pain or discomfort. It’s important to treat pain at the onset to prevent nerve damage and the development of chronic pain. This breaks the cycle and removes whatever’s disrupting the connection.
Chiropractors aim to remove any interference on these nerve pathways by performing spinal adjustments. In this technique, we use our hands to apply a controlled thrust to the joints in the spine. This reduces pressure on the central nervous system. So chiropractic care is especially effective in relieving radiating pains such as sciatica, neck pain, upper and lower back pain and headaches.
The full body approach
What many people don’t realise is that chiropractic care isn’t limited to spinal adjustments. In our Brentwood clinic, we emphasise a full body approach to individual health by combining other therapies and treatments such as postural correction, exercise education, massage therapy and lots more!
This is because pain is complicated and is often the result of many factors especially if it’s become chronic. It’s really important to dig a little deeper and see the bigger picture by looking beyond the part of you that hurts.
In other words, there’s little point in simply removing the pain by reversing the damage if you don’t track-down why the problem was there in the first place! We need to identify bad habits and adapt our lifestyle so that pain doesn’t return.
Did you know that we are on average 1 cm taller in the morning than at night?
This is because during the day our joints actually undergo significant stress from gravity, let alone any extra force from bad posture, excess weight and any other added pressure.
We might complain and be frustrated with back pain caused by a sedentary lifestyle or from a more physically challenging job, but we can also change that! Let’s adapt to the demands of these situations. Daily physical stress will always be present in our lives, but we can remove built-up pressure on our joints with regular chiropractic care and effectively prevent chronic pain from settling in.
