Orpington Chiropractic Clinic - Quality Complementary Health Care in Kent

Pain!!!

Pain is medically described as "an noxious response to an afferent impulse" - or in plain english, "an unpleasant, bad or nasty sensation". We normally feel pain when part of our body has been injured and it is our body's way of saying, "be careful or you'll do more harm" and as a rule this is quite right. Without pain signals we probably wouldn't know that a muscle had been strained or that there was a splinter in our thumb.

Funnily enough though, when cynics say, "your pain is all in the mind" they are in a way quite right because pain is only ever perceived or felt when it finally reaches the brain. This also can help explain "phantom limb" pains where, for example, a leg hurts even though it has been amputated. After all the brain has known all its life that the nerve sending these pain signals comes from the leg... therefore the "leg" hurts!

However living with pain on a severe or long-term basis will be extremely hard to cope with. And it doesn't matter whether you have a high or a low pain threshold - whatever your sensitivity it still ****** well hurts!

If you regard pain in its most basic identity - a warning from your body - then it makes a lot of sense to get it checked out and possibly treated - particularly if it is either severe or has gone on for some time. There is nothing smart or clever about being "brave", "macho" or "heroic" by ignoring or dismissing pain. Just as it is not a great idea to ignore a high water tempurature gauge in a car! A more appropriate word might be "stupid"!

With chronic pain, especially when there is no total cure on offer, it is very common for the mind to alter pain sensations for the worse and so the patient feels more pain than is actually being transmitted. This is the kind of case where pain clinics can be especially useful, particularly in the way they are able to give the patient a "handle" on their own pain and deal with it far better. This can apply to many people who, after long periods in pain, begin to exhibit "pain behaviour" where they often will anticipate pain and "respond" to the sensation before it actually arrives! Just because your pain has a psychological component doesn't make it any less valid or worth dealing with. Nor does it mean you're "mad"!

More serious is genuine psychogenic pain where the pain only exists within the patient's mind. However this is decidedly uncommon! Remarkably we have even seen patients of this type "respond" to treatment as they have received the care they believed that their body needed!

So in summary we are all prone to "modify" our own pain from time to time but pain is nearly always very real and, whether you are a tough-guy or a wimp, it always deserves a certain caution, if not respect.