Shift your focus

The main reason people come to see me is they are in pain and simply put they just want relief from that pain.

Which is completely understandable, pain can suck especially if it’s persistent, impacting our daily lives or stopping us from doing the things we enjoy. So just about everyone’s goal is to reduce their pain, this has led to most interventions in musculoskeletal medicine feeding into this notion that pain is something to just take away or get rid of.

Now some of these interventions are effective in providing temporary relief, but recurrence is common which leads to the all-too-common cycle of dependency on pain management techniques I constantly see in clinic.

In previous posts, I have explained pain is an alarm, it is a normal function of the human body to let you know something is not quite right. We have to work with it and use pain as a guide to figure out what the underlying problem is, not try to get rid of it. This is why an assessment is so important, to figure out what structures are sensitised and what areas are lacking, then a plan to restore these can be developed.

Shifting your focus towards restoring the lost movement, function and stability, we see pain levels start to lower, as the sensitised structures are not being repeatedly stressed; this breaks the cycle of dependency on pain relief and then overall capacity of the body can improve.Instead of trying to reduce or get rid of pain and then restoring movement and function, reverse this process, focus on regaining full function as soon as possible and pain will continuously over time.