Your Body Is a Healing Machine

Why do some injuries heal up in a few days while others seem to last forever? That’s the million dollar question. 

Today we’re talking about chronic pain and what can be done about it that doesn’t involve taking pills for the rest of your life. 

A frustrating thing we encounter as clinicians: During the initial evaluation we will ask our client “What brings you in today?”

“Well, it all started when I got kicked by an angry mule back in 1982…”

 Thus begins the long list of injuries that finally led them to us all these years later, with the same symptoms that seem to have never changed all that much, despite various attempts at interventions ranging from rest, ice, and massage, all the way up to multiple surgeries. It can certainly be frustrating to deal with as we know it doesn’t have to be this way.  Nobody should be living with pain for so long.

One of the most amazing things about the human body is it’s ability to recover from all kinds of trauma. Imagine if every bump, bruise, scrape, cut, break, and injury you ever sustained in your life never healed. You would probably look like a zombie from the Walking Dead by now. 

Just the fact that our bodies have a whole system focused on healing and fixing the things we do to it is a miracle in itself. We all have a little bit of Wolverine from the X-Men in us. Yet too many people suffer a back injury and spend the rest of their life saying they shouldn’t lift anything anymore because they “have a bad back”. 

This is just not true.  And there’s far too many people in the medical community who reinforce that idea.  

Most injuries will biologically heal themselves in 6-12 weeks as long as they are in a good environment to do so. That’s why we put broken bones in casts: to let them heal undisturbed while they do their knitting thing. 

Soft tissue injuries can be a different story, because complete immobilization of a body part for a long time results in stiffness and weakness. A stiff/weak part starts to move differently, other adjacent body parts start to pick up the slack, and soon  you have a movement dysfunction on your hands. That movement dysfunction leads to more inflammation and imbalance and the cycle continues, for months or even years.  

This is where we as Physical Therapists come in. Proper guidance through the healing process is critical to a full recovery. People usually come to us in some stage of pain and understandably this is their main concern. Just waiting for the pain to go away is usually a bad strategy. 

There is an art form to knowing when to rest and when to push an injured area to achieve full recovery of your abilities. Conversely there is a way to treat your tissues properly so they don’t break down in the first place, making injury less likely from the start (unless you stand behind angry mules). Seeing a good physical therapist is key to getting yourself back on track to living your best life. 

Our focus is to get you out of the pain as quickly as possible so that we can get to work breaking the other parts of the cycle. 

Once your guarding is relaxed we can work on the stiffness and the weakness. 

As we get you more strong and supple we also work on your coordinated movement patterns, get all your parts working together nicely again. This creates the environment where pain is resolved long term. As we’ve said before, pain is your body’s signal that Something Is Wrong. If we remove that Something, no more pain!

This is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. None of us are Wolverine. Our job is to guide you through the whole process from start to finish, and then teach you how to stay strong for the rest of your life.

If you or someone you know has been dealing with pain for far too long, hop on a free Discovery call with us today and see how we can help you break the cycle!