SIX REASONS TO CONFRONT CHRONIC PAIN AND NOT JUST LIVE WITH IT.

This video gives you six reasons why it is so important to confront chronic pain and not just try to live with it. If you do nothing, nothing good will happen and most likely the pain will get worse. When pain has persisted for more than three months, affected muscles and many of the nerve cells inside our nerves, spinal cord and brain change the way they function from their normal, healthy state. Muscles shorten, develop sites of sustained contraction, lose parts of their range of motion and exist under excessive tension. Nerve cells can stay active long after an initiating stimulus ends, increase the area of the body they respond to and secrete chemicals into muscles that keep them in a shortened and inflamed state. Allowing these changes to persist increases the chance for damage to joints and their cartilages. In the case of the spinal column, for example, when there is long standing low back pain or neck pain, the disks that lie between the vertebrae are put at risk of getting damaged. 

These changes largely explain why long standing pain is so difficult to treat with a either a single exercise or drug. These changes also underlie so much of the agony of chronic pain where no matter what single rehabilitative effort you try, the pain does not go away. 

However, there is a way out of this dilemma. The changes that have occurred to the affected muscles and nerve cells can be reversed. Lost range of motion can be regained, sustained contractions can be ended and nerve cells can be returned to their normal state.