Now that February has rolled around many people are looking at the progress they have made working on their goals in the new year. You may have been very disciplined or at least put in some solid effort, but aren’t seeing the level of results you expected or hoped for. The reality is that real change takes time, effort, and consistency.
Similarly, patients ask us why it is so important to continue their treatment plan even if their pain goes away fairly quickly. The key to understanding why true healing or change takes time lies in knowing how the body and life works.
What is happening when we say healing?
Let’s use getting sunburnt as an example of how tissue healing works.
When you get a sunburn, millions upon millions of cells are damaged to varying degrees from sun and radiation exposure.
These cells, rather than running the risk of replicating with damaged DNA, are marked and scheduled to be broken down.
Your cells are not actually “repaired”, they are broken down and new cells are made to replace them. This is how you heal from any sickness, injury, or minor inflammatory event. Even “tweaking” your back requires cells to be broken down and replaced.
Pain Vs. Healing
Pain on the other hand, is very different than tissue healing. Pain is always experienced in the brain. What we mean by that is that pain is a series of signals that are sent and interpreted in the sensory cortex. Those signals travel from wherever in your body you “feel” it, up the spinal cord, to the brain, where it receives the signal and causes you to feel what it is we call pain.
Pain is a signal that something is wrong. Pain can disappear quickly before tissue healing is complete, or it can stick around long after the healing process is complete. An example of this is phantom pain from amputee patients. This is why we treat problems, not pain.
Limiting Factors
There are two main limitations when it comes to recovering from any injury, sickness, or disease. These also apply to achieving goals or reaching desired results.
- Limitation of Time
- Limitations of Matter
Time is fairly easy for us to understand. If you get stitches, start a new workout program, or begin treatment at our office; you don't expect for it to heal or see the end result until a certain amount of time has passed.
Matter is a little more complicated. Imagine someone asks you to build a house. The only problem is that they don't give you all the required materials or pieces. Then halfway through the project (that you've improvised on to make due), the same person that asked you to build it comes in with a wrecking ball and destroys half of it. This can be what our bodies have to deal with when we don't give it the necessary building blocks to heal such as
. Good food
. Adequate rest
. Avoiding secondary injury
. Insufficient or intermittent treatmentThe Power that Made the Body Heals the Bod
Anytime you get a small cut, become sick, or have any other issue your body automatically goes to work to maintain what we call homeostasis. Your heart beats automatically. Your immune system fights off infections and continuously protects you. Your hair, nails, and skin all grow and billions of cells are produced every day. All of this without your input or conscious thought.
The innate intelligence in your body knows what to do. Chiropractic care does not add or take away anything in your body like pharmaceuticals or surgery do. That is what is so amazing about it! We are here to simply help your body do its own job correctly by making sure the control system, your
nervous system, is doing its job as close to 100% as possible.
