Many of us live with pain at some point in our life. Sometimes the pain is acute, or temporary. And sometimes it’s chronic, or much more permanent. Either way, we have a choice as to how we treat it. Taking steps to correct the pain or steps to cover it up. With temporary pain, such as pain that accompanies a surgery or injury, we tend to do what we can to tolerate it until it heals. With chronic pain, we typically start out that way, too. We do things to cover up the pain because we want to believe that it is really temporary. However, we soon realize how wrong we were.
It is not uncommon to hear that a person has “lived with” pain for a long time, especially in our line of work. But when they finally do seek care at Damron Chiropractic & Wellness, why now? Why at that particular point in time? What changed?
When it comes to pain, and living with it, we do not live in a vacuum. While our pain may be a constant, we continue to age, life changes. Usually what we find is that the pain a person is experiencing has begun to interfere with something they treasure be it their golf swing, holding their child, sleeping at night, or remaining active. The ‘living with” has suddenly become something they are no longer willing to do. You see, the pain did not change, the person’s situation did.
If we are to be honest with ourselves, we would admit that settling for “living with” was unacceptable. We chose to diminish our quality of life by doing nothing but covering up the pain. But the problem has bigger implications. We also run the risk of doing more permanent damage to our body due to inflammation and overcompensation from the rest of our body as it adjusts to live with the pain.
Procrastination does more harm than good when it comes to pain. We would do ourselves a huge favor if we addressed our pain head on. No more excuses.