One of the great myths about chronic pain.
“You can only have chronic pain when there is tissue damage somewhere in the body.”
This is one of the great myths about chronic pain.
I’ll tell you why.
With chronic pain, there is generally no more tissue damage. After all, tissue recovers within 6 weeks or in extreme cases within 3 months. Therefore, treatment of the tissue (such as muscles) is no longer relevant, apart from providing temporary relief. And yet this is done in almost all treatment methods for chronic pain. And that is precisely why so many people do not progress with all these treatments. If you are lucky it will, as said before, give some relief, which is of course super nice and very welcome, but it is usually not really lasting.
This is also called symptom treatment.
As long as you do not pay attention to the fascia, the autonomic nervous system and the relationship between body & mind, you can wait a long time for lasting results …
What happens in almost most cases takes place in the brain (the amygdala to be exactly) and the nervous system. The nervous system’s alarm system is so hypersensitive that it continues to go off even though there is no threat anymore at all. The nervous system is the one that controls the muscles and therefore determines whether muscles tighten or relax. So you want to tackle the reason why the nervous system is continuously overstimulated and therefore also makes the muscles tense. A relaxed nervous system provides relaxed muscles.
Thus, pain can exist without any tissue damage.
But does this only apply to chronic pain caused by tense/tight aching muscles?
No, generating pain in this way even applies to complaints such as herniated disc and osteoarthritis!
If you take a 100 random people from the street WITHOUT PAIN complaints and put them under the MRI scan, a very large part of these people will appear to have large deviations. But the opposite is also regularly true, you may have experienced it yourself, you are in enormous pain, but there is nothing deviating/abnormal to be seen on the MRI! The visual images of bones and joints seldom help with answers when it comes to chronic pain and often say little.
For example, several studies have also been conducted in people who had NO pain complaints. They showed all kinds of abnormalities on the MRI such as bulging intervertebral discs, tears/damage of cartilage such as the meniscus, ‘worn out’ intervertebral discs, abnormalities in the hips, etc. And again these people had NO pain complaints.
The physical pain is real and it’s not between your ears as some practitioners say, but the real cause of pain is NOT in these structures.
So your pain is absolutely real, but chronic pain is in most cases created by an over-stimulated nervous system and not because there is a damaged tissue in your body or because there is natural wear.
Structural deviations and wear are natural and normal! So the good news is that there is something you can do about it!
Soon I will tell you more about why the nervous system is often overstimulated.
PS: remember when I told about my former own shoulder, neck and back complaints? At the time, my lower back had also been diagnosed with osteoarthritis and it was said by the doctor that my pain was probably, among other things, caused by this. However, meanwhile I haven’t had pain in my lower back for years anymore, although the osteoarthritis (wear) is of course still there, and will never go away anymore either. But so that does not mean that the pain cannot go away!
Karlien
