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
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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.
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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.
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Hardware issues make up only a small proportion of the cases we treat in clinic.
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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.
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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.
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Sound familiar? Then you more than likely have the leading cause for chronic pain: Neuropathic Pain.
Neuropathic Pain
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Neuropathic pain is the leading cause for chronic pain and is something you may not have heard of before.
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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.
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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.
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Hyper-sensitive reactions to what should be seen as normal sensations or actions, cause the brain to feel pain and make changes to avoid this.
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There are almost never any hardware changes or injuries that are causing the pain, just your brain thinking there is a problem when there isn’t.
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So how do we normalise this "hypersensitive" response? Head over to our Four Step - Treatment Process page to find out more.