Testing for Root Cause of Pain
Treating the Root Cause of Pain with Acupuncture
Thousands of people in East Gippsland live every day with some form of pain. It may be joint pain, muscle pain, nerve pain, headaches or sports pain.
There’s acute pain which you’ve got right now (like when you stub your toe), sub-acute pain that’s been around for 6 weeks to 3 months and then there’s chronic pain.
When you’ve had persistent pain for more than 3 months it’s become chronic. Your body’s natural pain relief processes have tried to fix your pain, but has failed.
Your body normally deals with pain (like it always has) by sending in its natural pain killers (hormones like enkephalins and endorphins) and the repair crew. But when pain has become chronic, that whole process has broken down and your body is simply stuck in pain.
The Most Common Root Cause of Chronic Pain
If you’re in pain, there is always a root cause/reason for it. Common causes are arthritis for joint pain, pinched nerves for nerve pain or poor technique for muscle pain.
But surprisingly, one of the most common causes of pain is when some of your muscles, which are well away from the area where you experience pain, have stopped working properly.
It’s like having a 4 person rowing team where rower number 3 has stopped rowing, so there is a lot more pressure on the remaining rowers. They’ll get tired much faster and the boat won’t move nearly as well.
For example, we often see knee pain being a consequence of specific muscles not working properly in your hip. Because your hip muscles aren’t working properly, your knee has to do most of the work which creates pain. Until you get those hip muscles working properly, you may never get on top of your knee pain.
Remember the song: “The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone…The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…”? It’s a bit like that. Everything’s connected so you need to look at the whole body for the cause, not just the local area where you have the pain.
It may be the reason why your pain does not seem to get better. It may be because you’ve only looked at the local area of pain and not the root cause of pain coming from another area of your body.
Everyday Pain or Sports Pain
Whether your persistent pain is from general everyday living or from a specific sport like football, the root cause is often the same. This makes acupuncture a brilliant form of treatment for both everyday pain (like neck pain) or a sports pain (like a sore knee).
“Most people with sports pain think of physio for treatment but acupuncture provides a highly effective way to both treat pain and to keep athletes performing at their best.”
Acupuncture Treats Pain
Acupuncture is unique in the way it treats pain. It can do a wonderful job of getting muscles that aren’t working to work properly again and getting your body’s natural pain relief system working again.
Acupuncture is like turning on a light switch to get things working properly again. Acupuncture is used by millions of people every day to treat pain.
Pain Assessment
To understand what the root cause of your everyday or sports pain may be, you first need find out which of your muscles are not working properly (ie. which member of your muscle rowing team is no longer rowing).
We do a short series of tests in our Bairnsdale clinic to find out where the problem is. During this free 15 minute appointment, we’ll conduct our testing, tell you what the problem is and let you know how we can help you. If you decide that you want us to help you, you can then book in for acupuncture treatment.
If you’d like to try to resolve your pain naturally, the first step is for us to talk on the phone first so we can get a better understanding of your pain to see if we can help you. This is free.