What Your Chronic Pain Could Be Telling You
What is Dysfunction?
Dysfunctions occur when a part of the body no longer moves the way it was designed to move. Sometimes this happens due to an injury. For example, when someone is healing from a sprained ankle, they are likely to bear more weight onto the other leg while walking. Once it has healed, the previously sprained ankle may “forget” how to bear weight and move properly, becoming dysfunctional.
It's common for dysfunctions to form outside of injuries as well. Our muscles can “forget” how to functionally move if we fail to use them adequately. Due to the modern day sedentary lifestyle lacking diversified movement, dysfunctions are becoming more and more common. “If you don’t use it, you lose it” strongly applies to our muscular and joint function!
Depending on Stimulus for Movement
We are all constantly responding to stimulus. However, if stimulus is the only reason for movement, we are unlikely to properly use all our muscles daily. Think about the last time you raised your arm above your head. If your movement is dependent on stimulus, it was likely because something prompted you to — maybe you needed to grab a plate off of a top shelf or you waved to a friend you saw from a far distance.
Compounding Compensations
The body works as a unit — one area of the body cannot undergo changes without other areas being affected. We now know how dysfunctions occur, but how does this affect the body as a whole? When one part of the body becomes dysfunctional, another part of the body will help take over its role. Our bodies are subtle in creating these new patterns of movement just for us to carry on with our daily activities. This may seem beneficial to us in the short-term, but in the long-run, compensations can lead to inefficient movement, unnecessary injuries, and chronic pain.
Let’s briefly go back to our sprained ankle example — to avoid putting too much weight onto the sprained ankle, it’s inevitable to start recruiting help from the opposite leg, hip, and/or lower back. The body creates a new pattern of movement that will likely remain even after the ankle has healed.
This can also happen without an injury. We can see this if we go back to our arm raising example. If the full range of motion (ROM) in the shoulder joint is not being used regularly, we can lose the ability to take it through its full functional ROM without recruiting help from another area of the body.
Compensations also have a compounding nature. When one part of the body takes over another’s role, the compensating area starts doing more than it was designed to do and can become overwhelmed. The compensating area now needs help, creating further dysfunctions and compensations.
Pain is Your Body’s Way of Communicating with You
The human body is incredibly adaptable, but there will come a point when the body can no longer seamlessly compensate to keep up with the demands put on it.
In some cases, the body is struggling to find a way to further compensate, but takes time to create a new pattern of movement. In this instance, you may experience a “random” occurrence of pain then have it simply disappear weeks or months later after your body creates a new compensation pattern. Other times, the body has exhausted all other possible alternative movement patterns and there is no further way the body can compensate, giving rise to chronic pain.
In either scenario, the body is sending pain as a signal to tell us something is not right.
“Pain is not something to be feared, it is something to be understood.”
— Pete Egoscue
The Site of the Pain is Rarely the Source of the Pain
Understanding how dysfunctions lead to compounding compensations that eventually lead to chronic pain helps us see that the root cause of pain is presumably dysfunction. Learning how pain tends to come up when there’s no further way to compensate helps us understand that the site of the pain is typically where compensation lies, not dysfunction (the root cause of our pain). Simply put, the site of our pain is rarely the source of our pain.
Often, conventional treatments will treat the site of pain which we now know is likely a symptom of dysfunction being present somewhere in the body. If there is relief of pain, but the root cause of the pain remains unaddressed, we are merely masking the symptom and silencing the communication from our body. Until the dysfunction is addressed, it will continue to lead to compensations and therefore, chronic pain.
Postural Alignment Therapy provides custom sequenced functional movement for the layers of dysfunctions and patterns of compensation present in the body. The dysfunctions and compensations are addressed by realigning the entire body closer to its functional design posture. The focus is not at the site of the pain because the entire body must be treated to end the dysfunction, compensation, and pain cycle.