Why do I hurt?
The causes for almost all pain, chronic or acute can be put down to two main reasons:
A Recent Injury, Accident, Illness or Medical Procedure
Also known as pain associated to "hardware" injury or changes. Hardware injury refer to damage, injury or inflammation to muscles, tendons, ligaments connective tissue and bones.
Examples of hardware injuries are broken bones, torn ligaments, genuine compression on nerves from a prolapsed disk in the spine or the localised trauma as a result of surgery.
Hardware issues make up only a small proportion of the cases we treat in clinic.
All hardware injuries should heal within 3-6 months. Pain that continues after an injury is healed is much more likely to occur for Neuropathic reasons.
That whiplash injury you had ten years ago is healed and no longer and injury; but your brain may still be reacting as if it is.
Sound familiar? Then you more than likely have the leading cause for chronic pain: Neuropathic Pain.
Neuropathic Pain
Neuropathic pain is the leading cause for chronic pain and is something you may not have heard of before.
It is where the brain becomes hyper-sensitive and hyper-reactive to what should be normal sensations or activities.
Put simply, your brain is processing certain information from your body as dangerous and responds by making you feel pain.
Here is a great metaphor to describe neuropathic pain:
Your brain is being thrown a tennis ball to catch, but
instead of a tennis ball, it see’s a hand grenade and responds accordingly to that. From here on out, every time a tennis ball is thrown in its direction, the brain will respond as if a hand grenade has been thrown.
Hyper-sensitive reactions to what should be seen as normal sensations or actions, cause the brain to feel danger or pain and force it to make changes to avoid this.
So how do we normalise this "hypersensitive" response? Head over to our Four Step - Treatment Process page to find out more.
