Ah! The Joys of life!
Hugging your children or nearest and dearest, hitting a cracking golf/football shot, a lovely walk in the country, a meal with family and friends, tinkering in your shed. Are you getting the drift? Wouldn’t all the above be somewhat sullied by the feckless appearance of pain?
Pain, one of the most common of symptoms can arrive in our bodies with little or no warning.
It’s not Ebola – let’s be thankful for that but in its infinite variety and corrosive, all-pervasive effect there is little else on the planet to match its devastating impact on so many lives.
In contrast to this, as I tell my patients, pain is good and even beneficial to a certain degree.
“Surely not!”, I hear you say, but pain is our early warning system, the body’s radar alerting us to take action before having to go to DEFCON 3.
The classic removal of your hand from something hot before you’ve realised it, hobbling down the road with a sprained ankle because the knifelike stabbing pain prevents you from weight-bearing fully and inflicting more damage: reactions like these show the body protecting itself as a result of pain.
What about pain that is not transitory but stays and persists, grinding you down? Pain for which there is often no single, significant cause?
Most of us wing it through life pain-free apart from self-inflicted injuries and occasional toothache, but for some, persistent chronic (long-standing) pain is a daily companion.
The bane of many is osteoarthritis (OA), not quite one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse I grant you, but insidiously this single condition is primarily the result of cumulative trauma over many years and can impede living fully.
If you do have pain, don’t accept it and do the British stiff upper lip bit.
Don’t accept that your condition cannot be helped, that it is a fait accompli.
Do everything you can to ease, moderate and understand the cause of the condition and control its effects.
Remind yourself that many people spend their lives oblivious of their OA so why shouldn’t you?
There are many different treatments and approaches available, chiropractic and physiotherapy being some of the most effective and safe treatments, to advise and help, so you don’t need to rely on the welcome but palliative effects of painkillers.
Keep looking: you might just find a better quality of life.
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