50+ Lifestyles

Pain: Simple to Feel, Hard to Diagnose

By Logan Anderson, BA, CPT, CIFT
Owner of All Strong Fitness LLC

As individuals move through their lifespan, they are likely to deal with numerous different aches, pains, and grimaces. These occurrences may happen during certain activities, or be persistent throughout the day. Most daily pain likely can’t be fully avoided, but rather managed to the best of our abilities. Looking at what pain itself is, how it is typically treated, and ways to self manage pain, will give a snapshot of just how complex the topic truly is.

An important question to ask ourselves is, “what is pain?” A dictionary definition of pain reads as, “physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury.” If something hurts in my body, it must be because of something physically wrong with me. This is a frame of mind often fed to us by modern medicine. Now, modern medicine has made great leaps and bounds over the years in regards to pain diagnosis, management, and research. Despite this, individuals that work directly with patients likely have a simplistic way of viewing pain. This view stems from the biomedical model of pain, which simply focuses on what is going wrong in the body itself at the point of pain. Although a good place to start, there are other factors that go into the experience of pain itself.

I am sure you are asking, “what else could be causing my pain?” A better way of looking at pain is through the lens of the biopsychosocial model. This suggests that pain could be due to biological reasons (such as harm to the body), psychological reasons, and social reasons. A good way to simplify it is to look at the experience of hunger. Although hunger is at times driven through biological reasons (our body needing energy), there is also social aspects (others around you eating food), and psychological aspects (seeing a commercial of food), which may ultimately trigger the hunger response. Pain can be looked at in this regard as well. If someone has once told you that “if you bend down a certain way you might hurt your back,” unfortunately they set you up for failure. That conversation will lead you to hyperfocus that every little movement you do might cause pain.

Understanding that pain is a multi-faceted experience, we should look at what to do about it. The first thing to know is that pain is a normal experience, and that your body is resilient and can overcome it. Then we must ask ourselves what activities cause pain, what activities don’t cause pain, and what activities do we want to be able to do without pain? Finding variations of activities that are similar to our desired activity, but doesn’t cause pain is the goal. For example, if you want to walk without pain, but can only do so with a cane, slowly ease off use of the cane. Start with only one minute of walking without the cane, or as much as you can tolerate. Over time, try to build up tolerance to greater durations without the cane. You are trying to desensitize yourself from thinking that every movement you do without the cane will cause pain.

In short, understanding that pain is complex, and that multiple inputs work into triggering the experience of pain is crucial. Our bodies are not machines that simply wear down and need replacements for every pain we feel. There are numerous different ways of pain management, the one listed above simply one of them. To finish, remember that your body got you this far, it’s not time to start doubting it’s abilities now.

For more information please contact Logan Anderson, owner of All Strong Fitness LLC. He can be reached at (563) 210-3701 or by email: allstrongfitnessllc@gmail.com