Symptoms, What A Pain In The (Insert Body Part Here)!

We have all experienced it--you wake up one morning, and something hurts.   You spend the whole morning trying to figure out what you did that made you end up in pain but cannot come up with a logical explanation.   Eventually you just give up, chalk it up to the classic “I must have slept wrong” excuse, and hope it goes away soon.   Sometimes that pain does go away, and other times it stays around for a while.  If the pain stays for a long enough time, we end up having to see someone about it to try to fix the problem. 

Pain is one of many different types of symptoms.   Other types of symptoms include numbness, tingling sensations, burning, itching, redness of the skin, inflammation, and even weakness.  Symptoms are what let us know there is a problem somewhere in our body.   In other words, underlying problems in our body cause the expression of symptoms.   These problems could be new or they could have been around for a long time but were not previously serious enough to cause symptoms to show up.  One key point to remember when discussing symptoms is that Symptoms are only part of the problem, not all of the problem.  This point cannot be emphasized enough (if I could make that last sentence bigger and bolder I would, but I don’t think it would fit).  When an injury or problem occurs, the symptoms are what motivate us to get care, but they are not necessarily what require care.  Pain is the most common symptom associated with an injury.  

To emphasize the symptoms vs. problem concept, let’s think about a water pipe in the basement of a house.  In this analogy the bicep muscle will be used as a comparison to the water pipe.  A water pipe has one function… transport water without leaking (normal water pipe = healthy bicep muscle).  One day the water pipe cracks and starts to leak water into the basement (an injury occurs to the bicep muscle).  This leak continues to progress and pour water into the basement until the home owner goes into the basement and notices that there is water all over the floor (the injured bicep starts to hurt and swell and we take notice).  So at this point the home owner has a choice: mop up the water and hope it doesn’t happen again, or find the source of the leak and fix it to prevent it from happening again (hope the bicep stops hurting and the symptoms go away on their own, or seek care to treat the injury).  Obviously the correct choice is clear:  find the problem and fix it to prevent it from occurring again.  That is precisely the goal of Chiropractic health care:  find the problem, fix the problem, and help prevent it from occurring again.