The Pain-Tension Cycle

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Are you experiencing pain?

Hands On Healing in Montgomery, Alabama offers a safe alternative for pain relief.

The Painful Truth

Everyone will at some point experience pain.

Some may experience more than others, but the basic premise is that we can all relate to pain in some way, and we all realize how much it can affect our lives.

The Challenge of Assessing Pain

The difficult part of starting treatment for pain is that there are few if any methods for objectively assessing it.

This inevitably leads the average person on a journey of near biblical proportions attempting to find solutions to the pain, going from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist, with sometimes little to no answers to the problem.

Are medical professionals missing something? The short answer is, no, they really are doing amazing work, and serious injuries and pain must be properly diagnosed to ensure that treatments are properly suited to someone’s condition.

The question then becomes, what happens when the medical route has been exhausted, and no answers have been found?

This is often the point when we, as manual therapists, are sought out, with many of our clients referring to us as their “last hope” in a long line of failed attempts at treating their pain.

A Different Philosophy on Pain Management

Figure 1

Our line of work isn’t a unique miracle cure for pain, and truthfully, it’s not even that complicated.

What makes our work different is that we treat a different spectrum of the pain cycle, which is illustrated in Figure 1 (click to enlarge).

Regardless of the initial insult that created someone’s pain, be it an acute injury, or being overwhelmed by their daily life, the cycle of pain and tension can quickly lock itself down and continue to torment someone with each passing day.

Tension Leads to Pain

Once a person experiences enough pain, it will often produce a sense of fear of movement, limiting daily activity and creating stress.

This lack of movement leads to bracing, armoring, and tension build up, which restricts tissues and leads to pain.

With this concept in mind, when looking at how a doctor treats a patient’s pain, we often see that the go-to choice for relief is pain killers, or pharmacology, despite the expression from clients that they would prefer not to take medication.

Doctors take this route because it’s what they’ve been taught, and what they are licensed to do.

However, taking a painkiller is not likely to change the spectrum of tension in someone’s body, and this in turn allows the cycle to set itself back in motion once the pain killer has finished working.

Alternative Pain Relief

As it stands today, there are no current pharmacological treatments for fascial adhesions or restricted tissue.

Some physical therapy methods are effective at helping improve movement health, but rarely do they directly treat soft-tissue adhesions.

It’s also important to note that any attempt at removing adhered tissue through surgery will create more scar tissue afterwards, meaning that conditions will only worsen with time.

If properly applied manual release techniques are combined with other facets of medical care, the results can often be very promising, helping to finally overcome many long standing chronic pain conditions.

Even difficult-to-treat circumstances have room for improvement when treating the right spectrum of the puzzle.

1. Source: “Woman in torn jeans feeling pain and isolation,” Photo courtesy of Imani Clovis on Unsplash » [go back ↑]