Responding To Pain and Problems

Pain and problems are ingenious ways for the body to communicate with you.  Yes, your body has a mouth.  So, why doesn't it just tell you what is wrong, and you'll fix it?  When you learn to genuinely care about your body, you will discover a deeper meaning for health and life.
How can you genuinely care?  First, you get involved.  You must pay attention and listen to the feedback that your body gives you.  All day long, it offers you a remarkable amount of information.

When you feel cold, warm, itchy, tense, relaxed, discomforted, comfortable, or in pain, your nervous system is providing details to your brain.  Even the types of pain are important messages to help you know what is happening.  Problem tells you that you didn't have enough strength in the tissue to meet the forces.  Torn muscles tell that the muscle fibers were not strong enough to resist the forces.  Worn out discs or cartilage communicate that skewed forces have been grating the tissue.  Ligaments back up the muscles, so tears reveal significant muscular weakness in the ranges that correlate with the position of the ligament.

The first thing to do if you experience symptoms or a problem is to ask, "Why?"  Why does this hurt?  Why did my knee lock?  What is the reason that I am feeling stiff?  Is there a disc pinching a nerve?  Is there something not working to make my knee lock?  Did I eat well yesterday?  Was I sleeping a certain way?  Did I sleep long enough?

You must become a detective who won't stop until you get your answer. Whenever you are interested in understanding something, you ask questions, you ponder, you try to make connections between the cause and the effect.  Learning is always a process of trial and error and increasing your ability to discern the truth from the half-truths.  Sometimes you are fortunate and the best solutions come quickly and easily.  However most of the time, it takes persistence, diligence, and tenacity to find what is best.  You must hone the skills that real, enduring health requires.

Symptoms are desirable feedback.  They are your body's way of politely saying, "Help me, there is a problem."  If you do not listen, it will eventually scream, "Help me!"  You may try to shut it up by using pain killers or cutting out parts of it, but this is not a real solution.  It just cuts off the communication.  Even if you feel better, you have not provided a correction of the faulty biomechanics.  The result is simply a postponed and often bigger, more painful problem.

Either you will learn to master your body's problems and your symptoms or they will master you.  They will make it so that you either can or cannot do the things you want to do.  Thus, mastery necessitates learning how your body works.  The more serious and debilitating the symptoms, the more your body is demanding you get involved and take responsibility.

The moral of this blog is to take a genuine, caring interest in your body.  Listen to it.  Get to know it.  Figure out how it works and how to help it.  Your body is the only one you have.  Treat it with the utmost of healthy tender, loving, care, and it will treat you the same.