Articles by Dr. Lee

YEAH! NO PAIN...ARE YOU HEALTHY YET?

by: Dr. Helen Lee

What is your first goal–maybe only your initial goal for starting chiropractic care?  Most people experience chiropractic for the first or second time because of a PAIN.  Pain is a definite signal from your body that you “hear” and pay attention to.  Some people may even ignore it for a while in the hopes that it will just disappear.  Sometimes it will disappear and other times it will get increasingly louder and louder.

So what is the purpose of pain? The first thing that people think is that pain is bad, that we don’t want it.  But is pain really bad?  Pain alerts you consciously to the fact that something is not right. If you hit your finger with a hammer, you’re going to feel pain.  You experience all the sensations that go along with pain and your body remembers it.  So are you more likely to hit yourself with a hammer again, or not? Of course not.  You may also experience pain as you start healing, as that finger turns black and blue over the next couple days, the pain seems to lessen.  But if you were to accidently knock that finger, you’d feel the pain again, just as if never left.  Why is that? Because pain is protecting you from further injury.  It’s a reflex that is built into your body to protect you.  If you have pain, you are going to have an aversion to whatever causes it to increase.  If we didn’t have this reflex, who knows what kind of damage we could get ourselves into.  So next time, you may not be so quick to wish that pain away.

Now, is pain the only way that your body alerts you to problems?  Of course not, in our incredible body, we have millions of reflexes and ways that our body undergoes crisis.  It can alert us through a muscle imbalance/spasm, gaining/losing weight, irregular heartbeat, increased/decreased body temperature, a chemical/nutritional imbalance, changes in hair consistency, rashes, etc.  But how many times have you noticed an irregular heartbeat, a slight muscle imbalance, or chemical imbalance? Almost never–until it gets so out of hand that the body as a whole cannot compensate anymore, and then you may notice a month, maybe years down the road that there is a problem.  So during that period when your body was under stress, trying to compensate, using up energy and nutrients, are you building more health or aging and degenerating more?  Right, degenerating faster than you are creating health.

So if that is the case, just because you don’t have pain or other symptoms, are you automatically healthy?  No.  You’re just at a point of no debt.  For example, if pain meant being in debt $1000 and health was having an extra $1000.  When you get rid of your debt, do you now have an extra $1000?  Of course not. You have no debt and now you are at 0. 

Our first goal is the same as yours–to increase function and decrease symptoms so that we can get your body out of debt.  Then it will just be able to take care of the “injured” site silently without giving you a signal of pain.  This is the most crucial time for continued adjustments.  This is the time when your body is very vulnerable and dependent on various stress levels.  If you don’t have very much stress one day, you don’t have pain, however if you have a bad day with more stress, you will have pain again.  Being at the mercy of pain is not a way to live a healthy life not to mention all the wear and tear.  That is why the corrective/healing phase of care is so vital to overall progression toward health.  This is now the time when each adjustment is geared toward rebuilding and gaining health–so even with a stress filled day, no pain.