Why Pain and Injury Becomes Chronic or Moves to Another Part of the Body.

Before I discuss why a person’s chronic pain doesn’t disappear easily and often ends up recurring, let’s look at the current medical model for treating pain and why is has been persisted with for so long when it obviously doesn’t work.

Most people with chronic pain or injury will consult a Doctor or physiotherapist or other conventional therapist, who will focus their attention and treatment on the area where the pain is felt or the injury has occurred.

The treatment will consist of one or more of the following things, exercise, stretches, rest, drugs (administered orally or by injection) or in extreme cases of chronic pain, surgery.

Most chronic pain sufferers reading this will agree with this assessment and that if the pain hasn’t gone very quickly, then none of these treatments really work very well. So why is this? If this is the best the medical community can offer why are the results so temporary or non-existent.

You could be a conspiracy theorist and say this is designed to keep a regular supply of money flowing to the overpaid doctors and drug companies, because the alternative of giving people a quick, easy, lasting solution to their pain isn’t profitable. Or you could just say there has never been any motivation to find a better way because the people with the money to fund the necessary research, like the Government and drug companies, have too much to lose by doing so.

Either way if you suffer from a chronic pain or injury, chances are you are going to have to search outside the conventional medical system to find a solution that really works and provides lasting results.

The main reason for this is because the typical treatments mentioned above don’t work and I will go through each one to explain why.

The first thing to explain though is why pain or injury happens in the body in the first place.

Pain in a normal person has the same cause as injury in a more active person, the only difference being PAIN is from pressure that builds up slowly over time whereas INJURY is from pressure reacting to a more explosive action.

The pressure comes from the force generated by a body carrying the weight of gravity around or pushing that force along during activity while their muscle system is not carrying the weight in a balanced way.

The pressure on a particular joint, nerve or muscle can be too great for the strength of the body to cope with.

This is what causes a bracing or locking up of a muscle or group of muscles and a pressure spot that leads to irritation, inflammation and pain.

The reality is, that pressure is generated by involvement of the whole body working as one integrated system not just the isolation of any one part as the medical model teaches us in treatment protocols. It’s also the basis of why treating one part of the body in isolation doesn’t work.

Why the individual recommendations don’t work:

EXERCISE: The idea of doing exercise is to strengthen the body against weakness and irritation, but when a muscle problem exists, muscle dysfunction is a major part of it and a dysfunctional muscle doesn’t start functioning again when exercised.

STRETCHING: Similarly stretching a dysfunctional muscle is useless because in most instances any problem or dysfunctional muscle is contracted or locked up and it stays exactly the same when there’s any attempt to stretch it.

REST: This will often allow a dysfunctional muscle to relax but it won’t release the contracted state it’s in, which is what’s required to restore its function. Often someone will experience some relief with rest but as soon as they resume activities and build up pressure on their muscle system again, the pain or injury reoccurs.

DRUGS: These are obviously just a pain block or band aid solution that can give a body time to put compensations for its problems in place and reduce any pressure on an injured or painful area. They have been popular more because of the poor results achieved for fixing pain rather than because they are a good solution. As well as the obvious side effects drugs will not change the mechanism that is setting up someone’s pain so they aren’t a viable treatment. Drugs are prescribed by doctors who have little idea about how to properly fix pain and it is a treatment that provides more benefits to them than it does to the chronic pain sufferer.

SURGERY: As a treatment for chronic pain surgery is the fall back for doctors when everything else they have tried has failed. The trouble is they really don’t try anything outside of their flawed conventional system so it is often prescribed way too soon for most people. Surgery pretty much condemns a person to inactivity, if not straight away then eventually and often the ongoing expense of drugs for pain management. This is great for the drug companies and anyone else who benefits from their riches and your poor health, but that’s about all.

There are people who work outside the conventional medical system using totally safe methods that work so much better, but they are hard to find and for anyone who makes their first stop the doctor’s office and puts their recover in their hands, they are unlikely to find these people.

My recommendation for people is they first understand exactly what is going on in their body to set up their pain or injury and there is more to it than I have been able to cover in this brief article. By downloading and reading a book I wrote for free, called ‘A Specialist Guide to Sciatica and Back Pain Treatment’. You can get it free and ask a question about your pain at www.backpain.com.au/forum