When we are in pain, our instinct is to focus on the thing that we think is hurting us and try our hardest to make it better.  We ice it, massage it, splint it, strengthen it, operate on it, and somewhere in the middle of all that, we tend to get mad at it.  But often we end up mad at the wrong place. 

Usually pain is the end result of a pattern of misalignment in the body.  In other words, the place where you are feeling pain is not usually the same place that is causing that pain.  Let’s look at a typical case of osteoarthritis as an example.  Osteoarthritis is the inflammation caused by irritation in a joint.  This irritation usually occurs when the bones in that joint are not lining up the way they should.  This can be caused by lots of things, but I often see it resulting from an imbalance in the muscles around the joint.  Maybe the muscles on one side of the joint are weaker than they should be and their counterparts on the other side are too tight.  This puts extra pressure on the joint and causes inflammation.  The way to take pressure off the joint is to correct the muscle imbalance.

The point is…It’s is not the joint’s fault.  The pain that we feel in the joint is the end of a chain reaction.  It’s the result, not the cause.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat the joint, but it does mean that if we are looking for long term relief we need to explore the beginning of the chain reaction instead of only the end.  If we don’t address the cause, and only treat the symptom, it’s like fighting an uphill battle.  It’s hard to get ahead.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people with knee problems.  I have one client who was diagnosed with arthritis and degeneration in her knee.  She brought me x-rays to see (I love that!).  I could see on her x-ray that the femur bone on top and the tibia/fibula bones on the bottom were not lined up correctly.  This put a lot of extra stress on one side of the knee.  This is typical of knee injuries that come on slowly (as opposed to a traumatic event like a ski accident).  After exploring the possibilities of what was pulling her knee out.  We came up with some strategies.  The simplest one was the realization that if she tightened her abs while climbing stairs, her knee didn’t hurt nearly as much.  My interpretation was that her weak abs were tilting her pelvis…which was aggravating her back…which was causing her gluteus to tighten…which was rotating her femur… which was aggravating her knee. It’s a chain reaction: weak abdominals on one side, a hurting knee on the other.  It’s not the knees fault…stop blaming it!          

The classic recipe for muscle pain is when they are stretching and contracting at the same time.  Muscles are supposed to shorten when they contract and if they don’t, they tire more easily and tend to spasm.  You can think of muscles like a game of tug-of-war.  If two people are pulling at each other the weaker one is most likely to get hurt.  If there’s a heavyweight boxer on one end and my 90lb grandmother on another end, (and both their feet were cemented to the ground), my grandmother is going to be getting pulled and stretched out but in order to not get torn apart, she’s going to be pulling back as hard as she can.  She’s definitely the one who’s going be in pain, but we can’t really help her until we get the boxer to stop pulling.

There are common places in the body where this scenario happens.  Pain and spasm between the relatively weak shoulder blades is often caused by tension in the short, strong, overused chest muscles.  Constantly tightening our glutes (butt muscles) can cause bursitis and tendonitis in the front of the hip.  Weakness itself can be the beginning of a chain reaction.  Having weak abdominal muscles makes us slouch more, which puts extra curve in our neck.  That stretches the neck muscles, which try to maintain equilibrium by contracting, thus giving us our stretching and contracting recipe for pain.  If we strengthen our core, we can hold ourselves up, release our neck and relieve our pain.

If we have scar tissue, adhesions, or a chronically tight muscle, that area will pull, causing something on the other end of the chain reaction to stretch and pull back and get injured.  I recently realized that all four of the clients I was seeing for shoulder injuries also have tight hamstrings.  OK…one isn’t really a client, he’s my husband, but I was showing him some shoulder excersizes and in the middle, we stopped and stretched his hamstrings.  When we went back to the excersizes we were both amazed.  He had much greater range of motion and much more shoulder strength.  I could even increase the weight.  His tight hamstrings were causing a chain reaction all the way up to his shoulders.        

Sometimes of course the pain is simply where the pain is.  If you hit yourself in the knee with a hammer go to the doctor and have her look at your knee.  That’s probably where the problem is.  But keep that knee in mind five years later when you have chronic ankle pain! 

It’s easy to know where we have pain but finding the cause of the pain is a trickier process and usually requires some help.  It’s easy to get frustrated and upset at the place in our body that hurts, but pain is often a message that there’s something else wrong.  In order to stop getting that message, we need to find a way past the frustration and helplessness and explore the root causes.  This can often take some help. I work with massage and strength training in my practice, but I’ve also seen effective results through modalities like pilates, yoga, energy work and hypnosis.  Once you start working on the real root, and not just the symptom, it’s amazing how much progress we can make.