Pain and Injury

What is Pain?

Why do I hurt? What is causing my pain? These may be questions that you ask yourself when you are hurt or have an injury. Pain can be confusing can be all we think about when we are suffering.

The Medical dictionary defines Pain as an unpleasant feeling that is conveyed to the brain by sensory neurons. There are many different types and forms. This will be on overview of how your brain and pain work.

Pain and the Brain

Pain is created by your brain. The experience of feeling pain is decided by the brain. Your brain can decide to feel pain even if there is no tissue damage and the opposite can bet true as well. Even if there is tissue injury your brain can decide not to let you perceive this as pain.

Pain can be helpful, as it tells us there is something wrong. The brain lets us know through the experience of pain. It might be because we are overexerting ourselves or putting stress on our bodies through repetitive motion or that we have an existing injury that we need to let heal. Whatever the reason that we are experiencing pain, pain is there to inform us.

There are instances when pain can appear where there is no injury at all, and this can be non-informative. This is when pain becomes a problem.  The brain has learnt to be in pain. This is due to neuroplasticity (how your brain adapts and changes). What you focus on drives what the brain is going to learn. Therefore, if your pain is all you can think of, your brain is going to learn to be in pain even when there is no physical injury. This is what we call chronic pain.

Pain and Chiropractic Adjustments

Spinal adjustments can affect how the brain perceives pain and may reduce or shut off the pain pathway. Chiropractors may adjust parts of your spine that do not hurt. They find segments that are not moving properly or are fixated and can impede the brain-body connection. When an adjustment is preformed at that segment the brain is better able to know what is happening in the body and may be able to re-learn how not to be in pain.

Going to see a chiropractor as soon as you recognize that you are in pain is a great way to make sure that the pain is properly managed and that you feel better as soon as possible. Another way to manage pain is not to focus on it. Be grateful for anything and everything else so that your brain does not learn to focus on the pain.