Pain! No one likes to be in pain, or see someone suffering from pain, but pain is your body’s way of letting you know that something is wrong.
Pain = your body’s self defense mechanism to protect itself from harm.
Just think what would happen if you didn’t feel pain! You might see a beautiful glowing red log in a bonfire and want to move closer to touch it. Your body would protect itself by sending you a painful signal, warning you that the smoke and heat from the fire is hot. If you didn’t feel this painful signal you might reach into the fire and grab the glowing red log to get a closer look. Ignoring the painful smoke signal warning from your body could create tragic results!
Our brain is always sending us signals that we need to respond to. Listening to our body and taking good care of ourselves is important so that we can handle the issues creating the painful warnings. Sometimes the signals are hard to read and we don’t know what to do about making them go away. A runner continuing to push through painful shin splints could end up with stress fractures and would have been better off resting. Fibromyalgia sufferers often do not want to exercise because of fatigue and pain. However, if they do so, the prognosis is greatly improved.
There are many options for dealing with pain, masking it, managing it or preventing it. Seeking medical advice to act upon your pain correctly is critical. Masking pain with medication is a short term fix. It can help reduce inflammation and swelling to help you move past the pain and start your rehabilitation. If taking pain medication is the only thing you are doing, you are not dealing with the underlying cause of the pain, and could lead to long term side effects if medications are used for extended periods of time.
Managing pain with NMR’s holistic approach will provide you with long term pain management, by determining the cause of the pain and also examining the person as a whole to see if there are other health issues that may be adding to the problem. (Treating a patient’s knee pain while turning a blind eye to the fact that they are 50lbs overweight, will not give them a long term solution.) After taking into consideration a patient’s daily nutrition, exercise and stress load, a treatment plan can be determined incorporating modalities such as; physical rehabilitation, chiropractic care, acupuncture, massage therapy or nutritional counseling, for example.
Ideally we would like to prevent pain from ever happening to us. Unfortunately there are no guarantees on what life has in store for us. We do not know why some people are pained with Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Osteoporosis or cancer, but managing your weight, eating healthy, tempering your stress and exercising will put you in the best possible position for healthy aging.
