Shift your mindset to relieve pain
By Patricia Delzell, M.D., Advanced Musculoskeletal Medicine Consultants, Inc.
The ancient foundation of pain is to remove ourselves from dangerous stimuli. Place your hand on a hot stove and your brain will send a signal to immediately pull it away without you even thinking about it. Thus, pain helped our ancestors avoid all kinds of dangers—from spider and snake bites to thorny bushes. Pain, however, is only a sensation. The physiologic process of transmission through the nerve pathways results in the pain sensation and the protective reflex to avoid noxious stimuli.
In chronic pain, the pain sensations are real, but the physiologic process has gone awry, sending the wrong signals. The danger has already passed, but your nerve pathways are still on high alert. In other words, your nerve pathways have lost their effectiveness in protecting you because they are signaling you not to move and creating fear of injury around movement, preventing healing. Therefore, the key to pain relief is often transcending this wrong signal, and that’s where ultrasound can help. By discovering that your soft tissues are intact and the pain sensations are possibly a reaction to scar tissue in the soft tissues—or that muscles are being overworked because other muscles are not working well—you’ll gain confidence that you are not going to harm yourself with exercise. In fact, the more you’re able to move, the more the scar tissue breaks up, the more you can exercise and the better you will feel.
At Advanced MMC, we separate the pain from the person. Pain does not define you. It’s simply a sensation that is no longer serving you. With various treatment options, we encourage our patients to shift their mindset from “What’s the matter with me?” to “What matters to me?”
It is amazing how quickly a person can heal with this change in mindset. It helps explain how two people with the same old hamstring injury can live entirely different lives—one has difficulty sitting, while the other is running marathons.
Advanced Musculoskeletal Medicine Consultants is at 8398 Kinsman Road in Novelty, Ohio. To schedule a complimentary Chronic Pain Phone Consultation, call 440-557-5011. Visit AdvancedMMC.com for more information, including blogs and videos.