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Right now approximately 50 percent or more of my readers have pain that bothers them on a daily or near daily basis.
Chronic pain is often addressed by taking pain medication. It just seems easier to most people to mask the pain rather than find a way to stop it. Chiropractic care is about finding the source for the pain and working with the patient to bring an end to it.
In many cases, people experiencing chronic pain have tried to seek a solution from traditional medical practices. In some cases, patients have given up the search for relief because they have failed to find reliable answers from their doctors.
Many doctors are frustrated when facing chronic pain. They are humans like everyone else and prefer to be rewarded for their efforts with the satisfaction that the care they administer or prescribe is effective.
Unfortunately, chronic pain is an area that many doctors have expressed a feeling of being inadequately prepared for in their medical training.
Even the term “pain management” that refers to the specialists that often deal with patients with chronic pain reveals an underlying truth about the medical approach. The title indicates that the focus is primarily on providing medication such as narcotics to patients in an effort to help them “manage” pain. There seems to be no expectation of actually curing or eliminating the pain.
Pain is a very complex entity. I have spent a good part of my professional life researching and seeking to understand pain and how to diagnose and address it.
One of the more encouraging things I have learned is that many people have pain that originates in the complex assortment of muscles and connective tissues in our body.
There is a name for this complex but very common type of pain: myofascial pain syndrome. The words pain and syndrome should be self-obvious in their meaning. However myofascial is likely a new term for most readers. It simply means that the pain originates from muscle and the connective tissue surrounding the muscles.
This kind of pain is very common and affects up to 80 percent of us at one time or another. The pain can be felt in practically any area of the body. It is often a dull achy pain that may be hard to pinpoint. It may affect major joints, commonly the neck and spine, shoulders, elbow, hips and knees.
Many patients with myofascial pain have seen doctors and had imaging such as x-rays or MRIs. They may have been told that the imaging showed nothing wrong or that they have “a little arthritis.”
Patients are often prescribed various pain medications, anti-inflammatory drugs, muscle relaxers or sometimes anti-depressants or even anti-seizure medication.
Medications don’t work. The drugs do not address the underlying cause of the pain.
In order to actually eliminate the pain it is essential to locate and treat the actual problem. In my experience, proper treatment will often eliminate the pain completely.
Contemporary acupuncture, trigger point therapy, dry-needling, chiropractic soft tissue techniques all can be effective in addressing myofascial pain syndrome.
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