When Pain Chases You
Imagine you’ve suffered an injury. For the sake of this scenario, let’s say it’s your hip. You have no idea how you hurt your hip, but every time you attempt something active, it begins to hurt more. At first, jumping and running became more difficult and so you stopped doing those activities. Keeping away from those activities helped for a while, but then tennis and golf became more painful as well. You stopped playing tennis and used a golf cart to limit your walking. Unfortunately, now even limited walking has become uncomfortable, but it’s the only thing you can do, as all of your other activities are just too painful to take part in.
The difficult thing for you to figure out is how you even hurt your hip in the first place. It’s not like you had a fall or car accident. The only thing you know at this point is that your quality of life has suffered because the things you used to find fun have become too hard. You somehow got boxed into a corner and pain drove you there. This is a hard place to be in and there’s an expression for it: Being chased by pain.
Being chased by pain is when you are unable to break the pain cycle. Pain develops, you avoid movements or activities as a result, you become less active, you weaken and lose muscle mass. Losing muscle mass leads to reduced joint stability and makes you more prone to injury. Your body suffers and more pain develops. Rinse and repeat. This is the pain cycle.
It’s a natural instinct to avoid behavior that triggers pain. Pain doesn’t feel good and so we try to navigate around it. While short term this can be helpful, long term it can have disastrous effects and will drain away your quality of life. It doesn’t have to be this way, but how do you break this cycle? I can tell you right now that fear avoidance is not the way. Ignoring the injury and just “pushing through” isn’t the way either because that could lead to more injury. You need to address the problem and build your body back up in the right way.
The key to breaking the pain cycle is to get active again in the correct way. In our office, this is a combination of educating the patient about the injury and moving properly while the body heals. It involves joint manipulation and muscle therapies to mobilize areas of restriction so you can move within your proper range of motion. Lastly, it involves rehab exercises to strengthen and stabilize the injured area. By strengthening the area, not only will it aid in injury recovery, you will also prevent the injury from returning in the future.
Don’t let pain chase you into a corner, forcing you into a sedentary lifestyle and a lower quality of life. As you age, you should be able to enjoy all of those activities that you love and pain shouldn’t stop you from doing them. Take action, address the problem, and heal yourself the correct way. There’s no time like the present to break the cycle.
– Dr Rob Liguori
