Nearly everyone in their lifetime will experience pain at some point multiple times. It is the one experience that the most people don’t want to experience but will anyway. And most everyone is looking to avoid it and finds ways to eliminate it – as quickly as possible. For the vast majority, their is little understanding as to what pain really is and why it is an inevitable part of living.
The neurologist Barry Wyke says, “Pain is a disordered affective state brought into being by chemical or mechanical changes in various tissues…” But there is more to it than that.
In the traditional medical realm of things, function is everything and is a the standard by which symptoms are assessed and measured. Function is tangible and can be tracked. There are testing devices that diagnostically track whether function is improving, staying the same, or not improving.
On the other hand, a person’s state of being is not so tangible and exists within the realm of the brain and it’s perception of pain. Consider that individually there are varying degrees of pain for everyone living today. Why can one person seemingly scream at the top of his lungs with a small scratch and another have half their limb amputated and not hardly wimper.
Pain is nothing more than the perception of the brain to the injury or irritant. Injuries are typically mechanical in origin while irritants are typicvally chemical. People with injury or disease and are positive about the outcome heal faster than those who don’t. That’s why attitude is everything in understanding pain as you experience it. A person is more likely to health if they believe it will work and it makes sense.
Understanding the origin of a patient’s pain is the first step in getting it under control. Cause and origin are two different aspects: cause refers to an event while origin refers to a site. Think of the cause as the stress (dis-stress). They are physical, chemical or emotional. The part of the body or anatomical location can be identitfied most of the time but the effect of the stress is in essence the visible outcome of that cause.
Since pain is perceptual, pain is rooted in the brain which is where all perception is experienced. Control the brain and you control the pain. That is why chemical and mechanical solutions do not get to the cause or the origin of pain much of the time. Pain is only a signal that is something is wrong. It is not the problem. Until clinicians understand this, patients are short-changed and pain often becomes an inevitable merry-go-round with no thought about it’s cause or origin.
The nervous system and its network extending out of the brain are the receptacles and outlets for communication. Removing nerve interference anywhere in the nervous system allows for restorative and recuperative powers to regain lost function and begin healing processes. Allowing nerve interference to go unchecked impedes these natural forces and can create a pattern of dysfunction over time. This is why it is so important to understand where nerve interference gets to both the cause and the origin of pain. In turn a patient has the ability to regain both normal function and being once that is removed.