Does This Sound Familiar?

Oftentimes, people come into Essential Health and Wellness complaining of pain “coming out of nowhere”. Typically blaming their posture, sleeping position, or not having a particular injury. Or they did have an injury and the pain stayed around longer than the usual healing time. People
have requested and received imaging such as x-rays, MRI’s, and other scans; in search of the cause of their pain in Columbus OH but coming up with no answers. You may have seen other care providers that had no actual answers and some of them may even have prescribed medications or injections that only helped temporarily. Rest is unhelpful, sitting at a desk or driving for long periods of time may even worsen the pain. You may have pain that sometimes radiates down your arms or legs, finding yourself googling “piriformis syndrome”, “iliotibial band syndrome”, or “carpal tunnel syndrome” which lead you down the wrong path of therapy or maybe even
surgery! The mornings are hard to get out of bed because you are stiff and achy, and when you do move you hear some snap, crackle, and pops that you may start to worry about! Does this sound like you? You may have mechanical pain. Do not worry, you are not alone! Infact, over 90% of spine pain is mechanical in nature!

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Pain in Columbus OH Does NOT Equal Damage!

There are two ways to stimulate nerve signals and allow your body to interpret them as “danger”: Chemical and mechanical stimulants. Your nerves are always sending signals up the line to the main control center, your brain. These signals are sometimes perceived as danger, pain, and sometimes they’re not. Nerves are all around muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons to make sure you are safe! So in reality, there's no such thing as bone or muscle pain, there is only pain that stimulates the nerves that are around the area of the bone or muscle.

1. Chemical nerve pain is part of the inflammatory process. Examples of this would be sunburn, sprained ankle, papercuts. If you’ve had any of these injuries, you experienced chemical pain! This type of pain is usually constant and is not dependent on the position you are in and ice with anti-inflammatory medication helps!
2. Mechanical pain is pressure or tension on the nerve. This pain DOES change with position, movement, and worsens with prolonged postures. This type of pain will not respond to anti-inflammatory medications or time and rest.

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Should You Receive Imaging?

Mechanical pain is NOT a problem with how the tissue looks but actually how the tissue feels. What does this mean? If I were to take a picture of you, I could see what you look like, but I wouldn’t be able to tell how you feel. In other words, mechanical pain is a FUNCTIONAL issue, not a tissue issue like a broken bone. Studies have been made to get imaging on patients with no pain and they found normal aging changes in the spine such as degeneration, torn ligaments, even herniated discs! So what’s happening!? You have a chronically irritated tissue in a sensitive system, NOT broken or damaged tissues!

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Pain And Thirst? What’s The Connection?

Throughout the day you drink water. Why? You don’t determine when you’re thirsty, you’re not told when you’ll be thirsty, it just happens and your body automatically tells you what it needs to be satisfied. Thirst is your body's request for water, once you give it water it goes away! The
same thing is true of your pain and movement. View the pain as thirst and movement as water. When you have pain, do the rehab exercise until you feel like you’ve done enough and then do more throughout the day since now you know your body needs that! You don't refuse to drink water all day until nighttime and chug a jug of water, same goes for your pain and the movements.

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Can We Help You?

A lot of times, clinicians and patients both agree rest, palliative, passive treatments are necessary to “let things calm down”. We now know mechanical pain does not respond to rest and quite the opposite is what you need, movement. What kind of movement? Through a screening process we can determine patterns of mechanical and symptomatic responses to loading tissues. This screen identifies the movement you need more of to centralize- reduce the area of pain, increase the restricted range of motion. Once identified, the treatment will be that specific movement to you! Most common, the best exercise for people is extension since we usually don’t get enough of this throughout the day. Other options are flexion, lateral bending, or a combination of any of the three. A detailed history and exam allows us to identify what would help you.

If this sounds like you, make an appointment and let us help you!!!

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Why Are We Different?

We truly care about you which is why we NEVER make you sign up for any mandatory treatment plans, will not sell you anything extra unless you request it, and make you the center of care with your goals in mind. We offer multiple variations of adjusting patients, full rehab area to accommodate for anyone's needs, and additional therapies such as massage, dry needling, and cupping!

Liebenson, C. (2020). Rehabilitation of the spine: A patient-centered approach. Wolters Kluwer.

McKenzie, R. (2018). Treat your own back. McKenzie Global Ltd.