Addressing The Pain

How we make decisions can tell us a lot about ourselves. Oftentimes, it can show us a lot about ourselves that we didn’t even realize. For example, the simple decision “I am going to go to the store to get some food because I will be hungry.” How many factors go into how to make this decision? The exact way we go about it says a lot about our values and what we feel is important.

Maybe you choose the most affordable option, to save money to use for your family, for a vacation or to save for the future. Maybe you go to the farmers market, because you want to experience the freshness of the food, or be a part of the ecological cycle of food production. Or maybe you hunt and eat your own meat, for the purpose of being self-sustaining, and independent. Any of these combinations could sound familiar, but the point is that the way that we do things shows us a lot about what we think is important. And these deeper levels of our beliefs influence our behaviors in ways we don’t always fully consider.

Just like you can go out to get food and have vastly different outcomes (a healthy, fun, nourishing meal, or something that tastes great in the moment but leaves you feeling totally lousy afterwards), the same is true for other areas of health.

If we choose to simply ignore pain, or simply treat our symptoms, we miss out on a tremendous amount of the benefit of pain. As above, we can often get much more out of our simple choices than we think. How we handle pain is no different.

Chiropractic care is based on the notion of finding the cause of the problem. Addressing the cause of the problem and correcting it is a hugely improved strategy when faced with pain compared to simply treating the symptoms of a problem. First, treating or covering up the symptoms leaves the original problem uncorrected. It also creates side effects from whatever treatment, or over-the-counter painkiller is used to mask pain. There is also the habit that is formed when we make a choice, that becomes a part of our reflex set of behaviors over time.

Instead of reaching for pills, recognize that there are vastly different outcomes for how you choose to address pain. And then, examining the details of what those choices mean in the big picture will show you where to go. If all one wants is to suppress pain, then pain killers can be very effective. They are not an option that leads to health improvements over time, however, and can actually make the problem worse over time.

This is where it is important to have an expert, like your doctor of chiropractic, that can help guide the decision making process, and find the steps to take that will lead to improved health and healing over the short term and the long term. The best of both worlds, chiropractic is a strategy that can help feel better in the short term and also heal better, helping in the long term as well.