Understanding Pain
First things first, pain is completely normal everyone experiences thousands of times over their lifetime. Pain is designed to be a short term protective mechanism to stop you doing things that might be harmful to your body. A great example of this is think about if you've ever touched anything hot you immediately retract your hand. Though commonly though pain is directly linked to tissue damage this is not the case. Have you ever been out in the garden, playing sport and looked down to see a cut or a bruise that you have no idea how you got it? Right there is a great example of tissue damage without any pain.
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If we look at chronic pain which is defined as pain that has been present for over 3 months which has either been constant or periodic over this time.
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So what is chronic pain and what can you do if you're suffering from it?
Pain isn't “all in your head” but it starts there
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As we said before, pain is an alert system, but pain doesn't actually come from the site of injury or issue, it's actually all created in the brain. The brain interprets signals from the body about if it's in danger, if your brain believes you're in danger then it sends out an alarm signal (pain) to make you take action away from the danger.
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It doesn't just take into account signals from the site of a problem, it takes into account past experiences, current stress levels, emotional state and a multitude of other factors to decide how intense the pain should be. This explains why two people can have similar injuries but experience completely different levels of pain.
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This is very similar to a fire alarm, the fire alarm isn't the problem it is the fire setting it off. In this situation you wouldn't just unplug the fire alarm and leave the fire still burning would you? This is the same with pain in the body, taking painkillers turns off the fire alarm but doesn't fix the fire. We specialise in helping you ‘put the fire out’ for good so your alarm (pain) stops for good. Check out this great video diving into more about symptoms in the body.
Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the brain's innate ability to reorganise itself, it's very good at doing this and does it all the time. For example if you learn something new like a new language, new skill or starting a sport you may notice the more you do it the easier it gets. This is because your brain forms new pathways and dedicates more neurons to make the skill easier and more efficient over time.
How does this relate to pain though?
Unfortunately in chronic pain the same thing happens to the brain, if your body has been in pain for long enough your brain actually adapts the pain. Your brain actually starts reinforcing the pain pathways and making them easier for them to trigger, essentially your brain has ‘learned’ the pain and keeps triggering the signal regardless of what it's getting from the body or site of pain. At this point if we aren't looking at helping the brain relearn better habits the pain will persist.
Chronic pain is one of the most common reasons people attend the GP. Chronic pain can vary from mild to excruciating, continuous or intermittent, merely inconvenient to completely incapacitating.
Our unique Kaizen Approach is specifically designed to help make changes to the brain to relearn new habits and retrain the brain to not expect pain with minimal or no signalling from the body.