Are You Cleared for Takeoff?

Let’s talk about pain today. We have all experienced it from time to time and to varying extents. Whether you just stubbed your toe, touched a hot stove, or rolled your ankle. One of the first things you will feel is pain. Why? Well, it's our warning system. Pain tells us that we are damaging our bodies. It might be saying “hey, stop touching that stove it’s burning your hand!” or “hey, you can’t walk on that ankle until I have a chance to fix the torn tissues”. We understand that pain very well, it’s for our protection and we could get severely injured without it. However, there is another type of pain that is less straightforward. That pain is chronic pain.

To start looking at pain we need to understand a little bit about how pain works in the first place. The best way is with an analogy. Imagine your brain as a flight control tower. Like a flight control tower, your brain has control of and is constantly communicating with everything around it. The control tower will tell pilots when to take off and when they are cleared to land. Just as importantly the pilots will communicate with the control tower to let them know if there is a problem. Let’s suppose one of the plane engines is not working right and the plane is not safe to take off. The pilot does their final check before takeoff and sees there is a problem with the engine. The pilot will call up to the tower and let them know that the plane is not safe to takeoff. After receiving the call, the tower will cancel the takeoff and direct the plane back to a hanger. This is great! A damaged plane has not taken off and there was no harm caused. However, I want you to now imagine that there is a bit of a troublesome plane. This plane has an engine failure every time it tries to take off. Every day the plain is scheduled to fly, but right before the plane takes off, the tower receives its call from the pilot and the pilot once again tells the tower that the plain is not safe to fly. Now the tower controllers are very efficient at their job. After weeks of the pilot calling the tower and telling them that there is an engine problem before every takeoff, the tower controllers stop picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. As soon as they see the call come in from the pilot they simply cancel the takeoff and send the plane back to the hangar. However, a few weeks after the tower stopped listening to the pilot, the engine problem was finally fixed! However, there is now a new problem. Now every time the pilot calls the tower to let them know that all systems are go, the control tower simply cancels the takeoff without ever picking up the phone to hear what the pilot has to say. The plane remains grounded despite the fact that there is no longer anything wrong with the plain. The problem is no longer a mechanical issue with the plain, it’s now a communication problem. In order to straighten the issue out, proper communication must be restored.

Ok, so what does this rather long analogy have to do with chronic pain? Well, believe it or not, this is very similar to what happens when a person develops chronic pain. If an issue lingers for too long, the brain will stop consulting with the tissue and just assume the tissue is still damaged. Recent studies have shown that most chronic pain is actually not related to damaged tissue and is in fact a brain communication problem. So what can be done? The brain must learn to pick up the phone again and talk with the tissue. When a new signal is sent from the tissue, the brain will pick up on that new signal because it’s not the one it usually receives from the tissue. One of the most powerful signals is that of motion. When motion is put through a tissue there is a signal sent to the brain. It's like the mechanic calling the control tower instead of the pilot to say that the plane is good to fly. After multiple calls from the mechanic saying everything is fine, the tower will eventually start picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. When the body receives enough motion signals saying that there is nothing wrong with the tissue, the brain will start to communicate properly again. This is how a chiropractic adjustment helps those in chronic pain! The adjustment sends a huge motion signal to the brain, after receiving multiple of these motion signals from an adjustment, the brain starts to listen and to communicate properly again.