What you need to know about pain

Where does pain come from?

In short, pain comes from inflammation when a part of the body is injured due to an accident, repetitive use injury, or malfunction.

We are taught to take ibuprofen or Tylenol when you are in pain, which reduces the inflammation or pain receptors and makes you feel less pain, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

If everything in your body works properly you don’t have pain or symptoms.

When pain or symptoms occur there is something working improperly. If something works improperly long enough it will start to cause damage.

Inflammation is your body’s response to damage and inflammation is your body’s “healing response.”

You feel pain because your body doesn’t want you to use the area it is trying to heal! When you take ibuprofen, which is an anti-inflammatory, you shut down the body’s healing response and prolong the problem.

Most commonly, muscle and joint pain are a result of a repetitive use or injury. Over time, a muscle or joint stops working properly and gets used improperly for years until one day pain starts to develop.

Your body doesn’t want to feel pain and will compensate to avoid it until it reaches a point where the damage is too much — pain is your body’s way of saying “don’t use this.”

When something (a joint, muscle, organ, tissue) stops working properly and we don’t feel pain from this malfunction for a time, we might experience small symptoms — but not pain.

When we experience symptoms, we are taught to take over-the-counter medications that stop or slow down the healing response and accelerate the damaging process.

The sooner we can restore the function to the area, the quicker your body can regain its ability to function properly.

Remember, if everything in the body is functioning properly you don’t have pain or symptoms. So if you are experiencing symptoms (tight, achey, burning, shooting, tingling, numbness, stabbing, shooting, etc.) get it checked as soon as possible and work on restoring the proper function.