When it comes to pain, we are our own worst enemy

Every day in my practice I help people in pain.

The tragic part is that most of my patients have been dealing with pain and discomfort for far too long.

There are 11.1 million people that have been affected by pain in the last four weeks, based on a study by the Australia Bureau of Statistics. In my professional experience, most of these people will just push through the pain and hope it gets better instead of seeking out treatment or care.

Why do we ignore pain until we can no longer function?

Pain is a signal, a message; our body’s way of trying to communicate with us. We would never directly ignore a friend when they are speaking to us so why do we do it to ourselves?

During my patient visits the first questions I ask are:
“How are you? What brings you in today?”
“How long have you been experiencing/suffering/dealing with pain?”

The answers always shock me; its often weeks and months in pain that increasingly gets worse before they have presented to the studio. Usually followed by a list of excuses, “I didn’t have time”, “I couldn’t juggle the kids”, “work has been busy” and so on.

Reasons, excuses and pain; oh my!

There’s no denying that these statements are true, but they also don’t address the fact that you’ll be less likely to continue to manage your daily life if you don’t deal with your pain.

Pain impacts us in so many ways, mentally, emotional and physically. There is such a big push for self-care lately, why doesn’t pain come under that heading?

Make self-care mean more than just the latest #buzzword

The concepts of self love and self care promote ideas like meditation and yoga and taking time for ourselves to just be present, which are all extremely important in our overly-busy, high-stress, low down-time lives.

Let’s add ‘getting out of pain’ to that list as well because the impact that pain has on our body is so much bigger that we give it credit for.

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