Stop Chasing Pain: Pain Doesn’t Mean there’s a Problem.

Sometimes we all get caught up with the notion that if something hurts it must be a problem. It’s a very valid logic on the surface but as we dive deeper into the anatomy of the human body we find it’s not as logical as we think. 

So what do I mean then? Simply, pain in one area does not mean it’s the problem, it doesn’t mean it’s damaged, it means there’s pain. We must take into context everything else going on in your life and things that have previously occurred to try and discern the root cause of your pain. 

The first thing you’re probably thinking is what does it mean then if I have pain? Honestly, it just means your internal alarm system has been set off. Pain is an extremely complex thing that is influenced by countless factors. Some of these factors include previous injuries, past experiences, emotional state, stress state, beliefs, current physical stressors or injuries, and more. Why should you know this? To understand that there is always more than meets the eye when it comes to pain. Take an age old tale as an analogy, you step on a lego and it sends you through the roof. Very painful is it not? You look down at your foot and see the spot where you stepped on the lego has no sign of injury but that pain, wow, a solid 15/10 for about 3 seconds. The moral of this story is how much pain stepping on a lego can cause without the presence of a physical injury. 

An inference I'm making with this title is that you may have pain in one area of the body but the root cause is coming from somewhere else entirely. Take low back pain as an example. One reason you may be experiencing low back pain is due to overloading. The low back is painful due to doing too much work but why? What’s causing this overloading? That’s where the root problem lies, in answering why. 

We need our body to contribute “evenly” to movement & loading. In reality it’s not even, we ideally want each area of the body to do as much as it’s designed to do, no more & no less. Take the example above, low back overloading. That could be happening as the hamstrings are not doing their part and slacking off a bit. The result in this scenario is the low back picks up that workload and does two jobs. So herein lies the root cause, a hamstring that refuses to do the work. We can address this by focusing heavily on the low back and that will help reduce the pain or get rid of it but only for so long, as the root cause is still there. To get lasting results we would need to not only address the pain being felt in the low back but we’d also need the hamstrings working in coordination with the rest of the body so it’s doing its job and not overloading the low back.

If you’re experiencing recurrent pain or are worried about your pain being from a damaged tissue then you should go get checked by a practitioner (as you always should!). One thing that may be missed though, especially if you have recurrent pain, is the root cause of the pain, like the hamstring in our example. Why is this hamstring slacking off? That’s usually found somewhere in the story of your life. Before you give up on your pain ask yourself, have we just been addressing symptoms or have we been addressing the root cause of my pain?