Most of our health is determined by what we eat, drink, think, feel, and do. This gives us a lot of control over our well-being. I like to see health and healing as a journey. Please join me on a journey to better health.
Let’s talk a little bit about pain basics. Acute pain is pain that happens because of an injury right now and it’s basically nature’s wake up call. It’s telling us to get our hand out of the fire or that we just broke our leg and we’d better get off it and rest it. It’s a survival mechanism. Once we have a problem with chronic pain though, it’s not a survival mechanism anymore. It’s a different kind of a message. It gets much more complicated.
With chronic pain, sometimes we don’t actually know what’s actually causing the pain. We don’t have a tissue to say this is specifically where it comes from. And there are lots of pain mechanisms that get turned on in the body as a result of chronic pain. The body has ways of ignoring unimportant pain so that for example, if in ancient days, you were out hunting and you sprained your ankle in a minor way but you had to hunt in order to feed your family in your village right now, your brain would have a way of telling you that that wasn’t important and you could basically ignore it and you might not even know you had the injury. Those are mechanisms that can turn down the volume on pain messages that go to the brain.
There are also mechanisms that turn up the volume on chronic pain and we’re just starting to learn about those. They’re very complicated, and there are certain things that turn them on that we don’t fully understand but we do know that they get established in chronic pain and it’s part of the problem people have with chronic pain.
There are many different ways of turning down the pain messages that get through to our brain. Some of these are quite simple and available to us every day. For example, if we eat a good, healthy diet, we decrease the inflammation in our body and that decreases pain. Also, if we move normally. So, if we exercise, if we have a sore limb, a sore leg, a sore arm, a sore back, if we move as normally as possible, then it’s better for the pathways to the brain.
