Our Relationship with Pain

What’s your first instinct when you experience persistent physical pain? Alcohol?  Popping an Advil? Ibuprofen? Tylenol? Or the new popular CBD? What is our relationship with pain? What if the pain is your body’s way of telling you something?  Do you know what you are actually telling your body when you simply shove in all those painkillers and hope for the best?  You are telling your body “Shut UP and go away!”  What happens when the pain comes back again?  More Advil, more CBD,…  “Double Shut UP and go away!”.

If you do that long enough, what do you imagine your body will do?  Let’s imagine Pain is your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, or your husband or your wife, what do you think they will do?  Yep, just like any relationship, your body will give you more pain to the point nothing can stop it (like a huge shout), it will breakdown, it will destroy you (death)!

NATURAL HEALING MACHINE

Our body is an incredible healing machine.  Pain is one of the key warning mechanisms that your body uses to warn you.  Instead of treating it like an irrelevant nuisance and constantly trying to muffle it with painkillers, for our own health, perhaps It more prudent to listen to it like a mechanic within warning us.  So, before you pop in another Advil, you might want to consider listening to your body and investigate FIRST.  Like a scorned girlfriend, you will never get peace until you UNDERSTAND it first.  (No pun intended 😊)

LISTENING TO YOUR BODY

Now that we are clear that we need to listen to our body, how do we decipher it?  While I can’t say I know everything my body is trying to tell me, I am very glad that many medical professionals are starting to agree with what I am saying.  It’s exciting to see that the Western Functional Medicine field is finally catching up to the generations of holistic treatment in Eastern medicine.

By understanding the cause of the pain and different manifestation of diseases at a deeper level, they are better able to understand and treat the root causes instead of simply treating the symptoms.

HOLISTIC EASTERN MEDICAL TREATMENT

What do holistic Eastern Medical treatments look like?  I’ll give you one of my personal examples.

Many years ago, I woke up one day in the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I found myself not able to lift my back and I could barely walk.  My husband took me to the emergency room.  After the doctor looked at me, looked at my medical history and determined I had an L5 disc protrusion, he told me there is NOTHING he could do for me.  Since he couldn’t release me with the level of the pain I was in, he proposed I take narcotics (Opioid) to ease my pain.  I refused. He came back half an hour later, trying to convince me to take it again (And you wonder why we have so many addicted to Opioid?) I refused again. I told him I want a solution, NOT a bandage fix.  Finally, he gave me some Tylenol which I accepted. In the end, he gave me two crutches and sent me home.

From there, while still in semi-permanent bowing position and in pain, I arranged and saw a back specialist. While the back specialist appeared to be very knowledgeable in how the spine and nerves work–He pretty much recited the whole medical book in this area for me–again, no real solution.  He said I can TRY steroid injection (again, another bandage approach) or surgery.

With no solution in sight, I ended up in Dr. Chen’s office, a very experienced acupuncturist and expert in Eastern holistic physical adjustments.  He looked at me and decided to better understand my pain and use the specifics of my pain to understand where it was actually stuck and adjust from there. He always starts with acupuncture first, then physical adjustment through pushing my movements to my physical limits (extreme pain!).   While it was painful (no anesthetic allowed), with patience–it didn’t happen overnight!–I miraculously got better through every session with Dr. Chen. My back was getting straighter and the pain more localized. 

NEED A DOCTOR THAT LISTENS TO YOUR PAIN

I could see every session with Dr. Chen was adjusting his treatment based on the feedback from my body. Then a big breakthrough happened for me!

Dr. Chen told me there was internal bruising around my spinal injured area and he was going to drain out the accumulated fluid.  He then used an acupuncture needle with a cup on it and proceeded to drain the internal bruise.  He warned me the blood would look almost black.  It was amazing!  After he did that, the pressure around my injured area disappeared.  He showed me what he drained out.  Sure, enough very dark colored blood. 

Over the next day, I found I was able to lift my back up completely straight!  That was beyond amazing to me! Now, come to think of it, It totally makes sense to me!  When we bump into and injure ourselves, we can see visible bruises and it will hurt.  For spinal area, just because we can’t see it, If it’s injured, it’s definitely perceivable that there might be bruising inside that we can’t see, right?! 

This was a light bulb moment for me!  Wow, I have never heard any Western specialists discuss with me the possibility of internal bruising in my kind of injury.  I’m not even sure if any of those high-tech imagery diagnostic equipment could see bruises inside.  If they could, they could simply remove it to reduce the pressure which is causing most of the pain.

Of course, I don’t want to over-simplify the whole treatment process.  The point, however, is without letting my pain guide him, Dr. Chen would not be able to get to the root cause of the issue and properly treat me.

The moral of the story?  Don’t short-change yourself by covering up your pain.  Listen to it. Demand your doctor to listen to it and use it to help you find the root cause and create a real solution for you. 

Feature photo Image by Freepik