What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You About Healing Pain
What are doctors not telling you about healing pain?
"Holy sh**!"
I looked up from what I was doing and said, "Is everything okay?"
My middle age male patient asked, "How long do these injections normally take to have an effect?"
"Oh, often within seconds. Is it, feeling better?"
He had been suffering from sore joints in his feet.
I suggested we try an injection based therapy to help the tissues function better.
It was after I completed the injection on the right foot that he exclaimed, "Holy sh**!"
By the time I started to administer the treatment on the left foot, he was already noticing profound, changes on that first side.
Needless to say, he was feeling better.
The final time I saw him was after four of these treatments and he had regained full mobility in his feet and ankles.
He was able to run, hike, climb mountains, play with his doggo, and get up and down from the floor with ease.
Things had improved dramatically.
I have a lot of healing tools in my toolkit / medicine bag.
I don't usually talk about the tools of my medicine because they can be boring and technical.
It's kinda like going to the car mechanic and asking her to specify which wrench she'll be using to fix your car.
The truth is you don't care. You just want your car running again.
The tools are less relevant than the result.
The underlying principle is the same though, especially when it comes to healing.
We promote healing by getting nutrients and oxygen to the tissues and getting wastes away from the tissues and out of the body.
This is my formula for health: Nutrients in and Wastes out.
Some of my tools in my naturopathic tool kit include:
Eating healthfully for your individual biochemistry
Reducing the burden of stress on the system with active rest
Learning to communicate, set boundaries, stand up for yourself, so there is less stress to be burdened by
Moving your body effectively
Sleeping enough, deeply and restoratively
Curating specific herbal remedies and natural medicines
Restructuring the neurology so the body-mind is primed at the unconscious level to take care of yourself with health habits
Injecting healing nutrients to help you recover from daily, chronic, persistent pain.
All of these things essentially help us ask, answer, and address the following two questions:
What don't you have enough of that you need more of?
What do you have too much of that you need less of?
But here's what doctors aren't telling you about healing pain.
Pain is commonly a result of poor circulation. This means poor nutrient delivery and poor toxin removal.
Essentially the criteria of the formula for health are not being met.
There's a whole study of natural remedies called drainage.
In injured tissue, wounds, chronic inflammation, there is a toxic buildup of waste products in the bath that the cells sit in (called the extracellular matrix) that aren't getting released effectively because of the poor circulation (nutrient delivery) and the poor lymph drainage (waste removal).
Drainage remedies help with both things! They can be taken orally, applied topically, or injected into the tissues.
My take on this which I'm sure you can appreciate is the more direct we can be with these remedies, the better the impact is going to be.
This is especially when it comes to musculoskeletal issues, whether they be old residual pain patterns from a motor vehicle accident two decades ago, or a more acute injury from a fall or a tumble.
Even and also chronic inflammation that is degrading the tissues and creating a very uncomfortable day to day experience.
These injections are called: musculoskeletal repair injections, neural therapy, or biopuncture.
During these quick in office treatments, I Into the very top layers of the skin I inject two things.
lidocaine - a local anesthetic which immediately creates a numbing sensation (more on this in a little bit).
the healing drainage remedies which do the nutrient delivery and waste removal part of healing.
It it's important to mention that while I believe that your pain is real (I ABSOLUTELY DO!) I also know from the studying I've done in pain science that the pain is represented in your brain. It has it mapped out. It is so well rehearsed that it behaves like a habit - an unconscious program.
This explains why Positive Imaging studies don't necessarily correlate to a person's personal pain experience.
This is a paradigm shift that I invite you to take on board because it will help you heal.
If you take a hundred people and give them all of the imaging studies known to conventional medical science to find that they're riddled with problems in their bodies.
But... they have zero pain in their day to day.
On the flip, if you take another hundred people, do all those same tests to find they have no lesions whatsoever.
Yet... these people are experiencing chronic, persistent, daily pain patterns.
Modern pain science and studies show us that we cannot correlate imaging and injuries to pain experience. There's too much going on neurologically and psychologically for there to be a direct link.
The anesthetic goes in and it interrupts the signal from the the tissues to the brain.
The brain thinks, "Oh, there's no pain signals coming. Maybe I don't have to be in pain anymore!"
Suddenly there's this window of opportunity that opens up in the unconscious mind where now it can hold the possibility that it is an okay thing to be pain free.
This is benefit number one.
We interrupt the pain cycle and create a psychological, neurological possibility that didn't exist before or maybe hasn't existed for quite a number of years.
The numbing sensation was what the fellow initially responded to with his "Holy sh**!"
The numbing is a bit of Trojan horse because meanwhile...
Meanwhile the drainage remedies are getting to work.
The draining remedies are combinations of various herbal and natural medicines that are specific to specific joint tissues. For example I have one to drain the lymph, another to drain joints, another to drain nerves, etc.
While the numbing is happening the remedies are going in and scrubbing out the tissues. They're delivering nutrients to the area through the increase of blood flow. They're carrying waste away from the area so that the tissue can actually repair itself without being burdened by not having anywhere to put the garbage.
Huh? Haha.. Okay I hear you. Here's my analogy.
Think of it like this.
It's garbage day, and you have to take the garbage out to the street so that the city can come and pick it up and take it away.
But... when you open your front door your porch is covered in garbage and there is no where to step.
Now you have to clean off the porch to get to the path.
But... the path is also covered in garbage.
Of course, you have to clean off the path before you can make your way to the street.
That's the same with these persistent pain patterns.
They system is so backed up with inflammatory waste products that it can't possibly heal.
So the anesthetic Trojan horse goes in and the brain says, "Sweet! Lets try on being pain-free!" and the remedies are going in cleaning the path, cleaning the porch, cleaning the hallway, etc.
It's amazing how quickly people respond to these injection remedies.
Many of these patients are chronic appointment goers. It's a full time job seeing the chiropractor, the massage therapist, the physiotherapist, the kinesiologist, the acupuncturist.
Frustratingly they get a smidge of relief for perhaps a couple hours, or maybe up to a day. But then the habit sets back in. The program restarts.
To be VERY clear, I'm not crapping on any of these professions. I really value them; they are an important part of rehab.
In my experience, they're missing this circulation, cellular nutrient delivery, wastes removal component of recovering from injury. These injection remedies partner well with other therapies to help manage chronic pain
After 1-2 injections I hear patients report that the chiropractor says the adjustment is finally holding.
Or the massage therapist says the tissues are feeling more supple.
Or the physiotherapist says the range of motion is finally improving.
Or the kinesiologist says the strength is increasing.
Or the acupuncturist says the pulses are different meaning the flow of energy in the body is different.
I usually suggest starting with 4 weekly injections.
It's very common for people to get 2 full days of marked pain relief after the first injection.
And then when that benefit fades they don't revert to how bad it was. There's a new, better normal.
It's very common after the 2nd injection that time frame to increase to 3-5 days.
Eventually the injections aren't required anymore because the tissue has gotten what it needed (nutrients in and wastes out), in addition to the interruption in the pain cycle, to heal.
I encourage you, if you are experiencing any kind of daily chronic pain, to reach out because this might be an option for you that can finally turn the corner on these things.
Really it's about you getting back to the things you love to do.
Because I truly believe that healthy, happy people doing what they love contribute to a more peaceful world.
I want you to be one of those people.
I also believe that health isn't something we do just for the sake of it, but it is a vehicle that drives us to all the things in life that light us up.
For example, going back to the fellow I mentioned earlier. He was able to get back to hiking with his friends, getting up and down off the floor, tumbling around with his grandkids, running with the dog in the park.
He could now do all of the things that make his life richer and happier because of these therapeutic treatments.
Learn more here: https://nanaimoivtherapy.com/pain_recovery
I'm happy to help.
