Often by the time I see people in my office they have got to the point where the pain is so great that they have to do something about it. Invariably they have spent a period of time ignoring it, or continuing with ineffectual care or masking the pain with medication. This presents 2 big problems:

1. By ignoring it they have let things develop to a state where there is actual tissue damage, such as cartilage damage causing joint inflammation, herniated discs, tendonitis etc

2. It is harder to fix

If we let things get to this chronic stage the mind tends to focus on the pain as the source of all our problems, and removal of that pain as the only measure of success of any intervention. Pain is a symptom, and one of the challenges for any practitioner when helping someone in pain is that the feeling of pain is subjective, or put more bluntly they cannot feel your pain so an objective way to assess your symptoms is needed.

The method that I use to assess this is to employ a system of muscle testing. The benefit of this is that it gives me an objective way to measure overall health and muscular function and you have an accurate understanding of the root cause of your issue and a measure for the success of all interventions. Sometimes people are surprised that I want to look at how all muscle groups of the body are functioning. However it is only in this way that we can start to understand where the issue originates. Seeing and understanding the bigger picture significantly supports you to recover.

The two other basic premises that I work from are that:

- The body will heal itself, given the opportunity to do so. 

- Everyone is an individual

A good example would be if you had a stomach problem which was caused by eating a particular food which gave you stomach cramps and acid reflux you would be better off to stop eating that food, your symptoms would stop and your body would heal over a period of time and you would get better. Alternatively if you continue to eat the problematic food and take the antacid tablets, you are putting the body in a position where it can not heal itself, you are masking the problem and hoping it will go away. The fact that many people can experience similar symptoms i.e. one person may get reflux from milk and another may get it from wheat, would reinforce the idea that everyone is an individual.

To make that more relevant to the types of conditions that I see in my office if your musculoskeletal problem is caused because you have a nutritional deficiency expecting any sort of long term relief from spinal adjustment or any other hands on treatment is unrealistic. You can take this analogy further - if you have a nutritional deficiency because you are suffering from IBS you need to fix the IBS.

Hopefully using these examples I have been able to explain to you a little of how a back problem may actually be the expression of something else going wrong or interfering with your bodies ability to heal itself. Everyone is an individual and finding out what the root cause of any complaint is gives you a much better chance of fixing it. And to answer the title of this piece when should you look for help with pain?…. Look for help for your condition before it becomes chronic, the sooner you seek help the easier the intervention.