Neither… pain is a messenger.
I recently attended a conference on pain modulation. The first question we were asked was this: is pain good or bad? The answer is, neither, it is necessary. Pain is a messenger.
Pain is due to an inflammatory response and inflammation is the first step in the healing process. So, if you are in pain, congratulations, you are alive and your body is trying to heal. I am not saying you need to live in constant pain but I am saying this is one of the ways your body communicates with you and is attempting to heal. The most important issue for someone in pain is to find out what the root cause of the pain is and find out how to modulate the pain as your body is healing.
Modulation is the key with pain. You will have ups and downs with pain as your body tries to balance out. The key is to modulate those ups and downs so you are progressing forward towards health versus regressing backwards into degeneration.
Degeneration is what follows long-term inflammation and we do not want you to go there. This is where the body falls apart.
What does all this philosophy mean to someone in pain? First understand that pain is not your enemy and although we want to relieve the pain as soon as possible the pain is necessary in guiding you back to health. Second we need to find ways to modulate the pain. This is where we can help you.
There are techniques such as pain neutralization technique that is a safe effective hands-on technique to quickly give pain relief and restore proper neural firing to the muscles.
Other more aggressive techniques such as injections of pain areas with homeopathics work on every level of the pain situation.They restore proper neuromuscular firing, relax muscle spasms, stimulate cell regeneration and healing of all the tissues involved plus give pain relief. Acupuncture , massage and physiotherapy can also be beneficial tools to help with all of this.
Home exercises such as yoga, pilates, or stretching routines are extremely important in the progression out of pain.
If you have questions on the topic of pain or how our Naturopathic Doctors can help you modulate pain please call us and we would love to discuss this further with you.
Dr. Pidutti