Tip of the Week: No Pain... Lots of Gain
You’ve heard it right? No pain, no gain! Push through it--- pain is temporary, pride is forever! These mantras might work well to allow someone to push through a mental barrier in an athletic competition. However, when it comes to therapeutic treatment for pelvic pain challenges (and frankly, any other pain!), creating more pain is not the way to improve pain.
Here's a few interesting facts about pain
Pain is the brain’s alarm system. Pain is not produced in tissue—but rather, is the brain interpreting what is happening in the body (all of the signals) and perceiving threat. Pain is meant to lead to action (ie, my hand is on a hot stove—I need to remove my hand).
Pain does not correlate with tissue damage. We’ve all had those horribly painful paper cuts, right? Studies have shown that pain is it’s own output—there are many factors that contribute to why a person feels the intensity of pain they feel—this includes what is happening in the tissues paired with what the brain knows about the body, the threat, the current life situation, and so so much more!! Read more about all of that in my prior blog series (Here, Here, and Here)
Pain causes the body to protect. How does the body protect? Well, typically by really honing in on the problem area—this can lead to nerves and muscles being more sensitive in the area (the brain really wants to know what’s going on there!!), movement being restricted and limited, and may cause the nervous system as a whole to be upregulated (think: fight or flight response—protection response).
Approaches For Treating Pain
So, with this knowledge about pain, it makes sense that improving pain should be more about reducing the threat to the system rather than triggering a stronger system response. And this really is where our approach comes in for working with people who have pain. Our goal is to identify all of the potential areas leading to a strong pain output, and to slowly turn those down—leading to less “danger” signals, and ultimately, less pain. What does this look like?
Manual therapy (but gentle!) to the sensitive and tender muscles and soft tissues and if you’ve worked with our team, you know we have many different strategies for internal and external soft tissue treatment!
Specific exercises within a range the body can feel comfortable with: We often explore movements to slowly allow more freedom of movement in the body—but at a pace where the body will not guard and protect the area through more pain.
Optimizing other factors in the body—this means helping your bowels and bladder function well, optimizing sleep hygiene, water-intake, and a lot more!
Strategies aimed at improving the nervous system response: And we have a lot of these! Our goal is to turn down the fight or flight volume, and ramp up the parasympathetic system.
Wanna learn more? We’ve actually written quite a bit on this topic! Check out more on our blog!
And, if you have been dealing with pain and are struggling to get help—reach out, and let’s chat. While pelvic pain is our jam, our team really specializes in the long-term, not really responsive pains in the body—we’re happy to work with you to figure out a plan forward!
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Weekly Tips Pelvic Health Tips By Dr. Jessica Reale PT, DPT, WCS