Just Ease Your Pain... Or Fix The Problem?
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Pain can be a huge factor when it comes to injuries. Some people may think that they only have an injury when there is pain or the opposite that they are healed when the pain is gone. Sometimes these may be true, but more often than not that isn’t the case.
During any injury regardless if it is your neck, low back, or knee at some point there will be pain. Pain becomes a great modifier to measure progress but it is not the only thing that is important. When we become injured, pain is usually one of the last symptoms to show up and the first to leave. This is part of the reason that you can be doing some activity that you have done 100 times and then all of the sudden you get injured.
For example, tonight you go to brush your teeth with no problem but tomorrow morning you go to brush again but then you have a sharp pain in you back and it feels like you can’t move. We see this frequently with normal day to day tasks like brushing your teeth but also in sports like golf, basketball, and running.
Just because you get one treatment, a massage, or take some Advil and the pain goes away does not mean you are healed and ready to go back to your normal life. At times the pain in your shoulder might not be present but you are not able wash your hair or back out of your driveway normally. Another common example is that you can squat down to pick up your child without pain but you don’t have the strength to do so.
Parts of the time people just want that quick fix and get them out of pain. That quick fix acts as a band aid or pain killers. These are just temporary fixes or covers for a problem. The pain killer does its job of numbing the pain. Pain is a normal signal to your brain saying that something is wrong. Without fixing the problem or the reason that you are having pain then it will only be a matter of time before it comes back if it goes away at all.
The best course of action is to help fix the problem so that when you go back to your normal activities it does not become an issue again.
