What in fact, is the role of the mechanism of pain?
According to the most recent Haavik Research, pain is our warning system.
There are millions of tiny sensors throughout your body. They are at the ends of your thousands of nerve cells. Some of these sensors react to mechanical strength such as stretching and touch. Some of them respond to hot and cold temperatures, and other react to chemical changes in our around your body.
For example, there are chemical sensors that respond to Capsaicin, the chemical component of hot chili peppers, and others respond to the poison of a spider or snake. There are chemical changes such as inflammations that occur in your body, and the sensors react to them.
There are also sensors such as in eyes, ears, tongue and nose. All the information from these sensors is sent to the Central Nervous System (CNS) so that your brain can understand and interpret what is happening outside of your body. What’s the easiest way to imagine how this works? Think of the nerves as musicians with various musical instruments. The instruments are their sensors and all the musicians are playing their melody, so that the brain can listen to what is happening within and around your body. Some of the musicians play aural information, some play visual, and some play information of touch etc. All of these tunes integrate in the brain, so the players become an orchestra playing a symphony, which the brain listens to, verifying that each of them is playing in harmony – the brain understands the concert.
The brain needs a conductor for its orchestra. Actually the brain has a number of conductors working together. One of them is called the “Prefrontal Cortex”. (PFC). This part of the brain is highly sensitive to changes in functionality of the spine and is specifically and uniquely impacted by directly focused chiropractic treatment.
When parts of the brain do not receive the uniquely structured information, the brain decides whether you should feel pain, in order to warn you that something might be going wrong and you might be in danger.
Certain parts of the brain are involved in the “pain melody”, including the Prefrontal cortex. Other parts of the brain construct the nature of the pain in “the pain matrix”, but your brain can play many melodies, not just the one for pain. Your brain can learn new melodies.
Your nerve cells communicate with each other through minute knots called synapses. These synapses can either talk nonstop or remain silent. But how these nerves communicate, is what decides the type of music that the brain will hear. Each synapse is surrounded by an immune cell that affects the synapse itself as well as hundreds of thousands of synapses around it. Each of the synapses work together in a very complex way. This means that all the various body systems can be affected by the music that the brain can play, like the “pain melody”.
We have known through more than a decade of pain studies, that by means of this very complex interaction, your brain can learn to suffer pain, particularly when you pay a lot of attention to the “pain melody”. Within the nervous systems there are two important sub-systems that influence the pain melody significantly:
The Sympathetic System
And
The Parasympathetic System.
When the system of “alert of danger” is highly active, the heart pounds faster, the brain engages the body’s spare energy and the body prepares the large muscles for flight of fight. You become alert, awake and perhaps even perspire more. When the “alert of danger” subsides, the Para sympathetic “recover and relax” takes over the action.
It allows the body and the brain to relax, to heal the various cells and tissues and digest the food in an efficient way. When the brain is playing the pain melody, the alert to danger system is activated. The muscles contract and blood is removed from your reproductive, healing and digestive systems. This is excellent when you are under an immediate threat and a reaction is required, but it can be a serious problem if you suffer from chronic pain. Since this means that you will continuously have high levels of adrenalin in your blood, and a high level of adrenalin over a long period of time, may change your nervous system and intensify the “pain melody” in the brain, the pain matrix. This causes signals of pain and danger to be more intensely perceived and turns them into something more constant. Chronic pain.
This “pain melody” is generated by the brain, it is the brain’s way of protecting you from danger. So that as soon as the sympathetic system, the alert to danger system is activated, the brain will prepare and give preference to the main muscles preparing for action. For example the hamstrings, trapezius, bipolar and triceps and quadriceps all prepare for fight or flight from the dangerous situation.
This is excellent if indeed there is a threat that you need to face or escape, like a Siberian tiger. But if you are just under continual stress from your modern lifestyle, this is a far less beneficial situation for your health, and the muscles which have been activated, if they are not given a rest, can over time begin to harden and hurt. In addition, when the large muscles are activated for action, the small muscles like those around the spine and the skull, are deactivated. Because they are not helpful or useful when you are running away from a Siberian tiger.
So if you suffer from chronic pain, the orchestra in your brain is stuck on the “pain melody”, and it is therefore important to remember that your brain can play thousands of other melodies, not just pain, and it is possible to train your brain to drop the “pain awareness”.
If you are under chronic stress and suffer from chronic pain, training your large muscles is highly important, since you need to ensure they operate well.
It is also recommended to go to a chiropractor regularly for adjustments, to ensure that the small muscles around your spine and skull are active and moving. These small muscles play a very important role, “telling” your brain what the spine is doing, while the spine represents what the core of your body is doing. If the communication between the spinal muscles and the brain is disturbed, the result can be failure of communication between your mind and your body. Not only does the brain not know what is happening to the spine, but the smaller muscles do not function correctly, and the brain will find it difficult to understand what is happening in the other body systems, such as hands, legs and it might cause accidents and develop other pain and problems.
Remember that chiropractic treatment is already well known in research literature as a source of help for people who suffer from neck pain, headaches and back pain. This probably stems from the fact that directly focused chiropractic treatment helps your brain to know more precisely what is happening inside your spine and body and can help the brain disconnect the awareness to pain, when pain is no longer necessary.
Researchers have shown that chiropractic treatment changes the functioning of the Prefrontal Cortex – one of the brain’s orchestra conductors. That is probably the explanation for the efficacy of chiropractic treatment for people suffering from pain, by changing the “pain melody” in the brain itself. Let us not forget that directly focused Chiropractic treatment provides far more than just helping chronic pain.
Chiropractic treatment deals with the improvement of communication between the brain and the body so that you can function at your best. However, if you are suffering from chronic pain, do the best you can to stay positive, to be in motion, to eat healthily, to ensure good sleep and visit your family chiropractor, to get your personal and precise adjustment.
The information provided here by the Daily Backup Company Ltd., the convenience product manufacturer of Respine4u, developed for home use according to the general [holistic] concept of chiropractic, is provided for educational, entertainment, enrichment, purely for knowledge and information sharing purposes.
This information does not substitute professional advice and / or treatment of any kind. Daily Backup Company Inc. takes no responsibility for the use or non-use of this information.
Although the information is based on the videos of Haavik Research Limited and is intended to encourage you to be aware of your health in general but with regards to your health, your lifestyle, self-learning and research characteristics, your health care should be based on collaboration with professionals.