Practical Pain Management

We know that pain sucks, right? We also know that if our body/mind didn’t produce pain we would probably not be too well or even able to read this blog right now. You see pain serves us by alerting us that there’s something wrong which requires our attention.

So, we understand that pain is an important function for our survival and for health but when does pain become a pain in the proverbial? Well, most people who suffer from chronic pain would understand the reality of having to experience discomfort daily. For others it might come and go, but regardless of its presentation something interesting happens in the body when pain evolves from purely alerting us of harm, to becoming the harm that we perceive to be threatening our survival.

We call this chronic pain but also pain which is mediated from our brains. That’s not to say that pain exists only in our brains because obviously when some part of our system is injured there’s a legit reason for having it. The processing of pain occurs in higher brain centres where our values, beliefs, understandings, expectations and experiences exist. This is where we give value to the threat: when will I be able to swim or run again, and what will this mean to my fitness goals? “Oh God I’m going to put on so much weight”. This leads us to catastrophize, and this adds further negative input into an already sensitised nervous system.

Fortunately, there are solutions to reducing the likelihood of acute pain progression and that’s where physical therapy can help.

Using various treatments, manual therapy can change the way our brain perceives threat by decreasing the sensory stimulus it receives. The mechanism by which this is done is by the stimulation of fast acting sensory nerve fibres which intercept the pain signals from the slower conducting pain sensing nerve fibres. By modulating pain signals, we lower the volume on those painful stimuli which can reduce the level of pain experienced.

The mechanisms by which manual therapy creates changes to the neurophysiological system are:

• Pain Gating

The input from the stimulation of large nerves which transmit information to the spinal cord and brain interrupt the transmission of smaller pain producing fibres.

• Descending supra spinal regions

Pain is inhibited by processes that begin in the midbrain which travel to the spinal cord. The pain is suppressed through this action and long term pain which is identified as central (coming from the brain), is also suppressed.

• Adaptation

Less painful input from the sight of pain can increase the threshold of pain meaning that it would take more painful stimulus to evoke a response and this is due to changes in the electrochemical properties at the site.

This provides us with a window to which we can address altered muscle and postural imbalances aiming to resolve what led to the pain appearing in the first place.

Myotherapy is a holistic manual therapy approach for the treatment of painful musculoskeletal conditions which considers the mechanism of pain and provides tailored solutions for its treatment and its resolution. As therapists we use the above concepts to help change your pain experience through hands on therapies, tools like cupping and needling, exercises and modifications to your daily activities.

If you are experiencing pain and are looking for a solution out of it now, we are here to help. Book your consultation and treatment with our therapist and we will guide you through a treatment plan customised for you and your specific circumstances.