explain
pain
section
6
page
114
Education and understanding
(continued)
Your hurts won’t harm you
T
est yourself… if you have understood a key theme of this
book, then youwill now be able to understand, acute
trauma aside, that
‘when I am in pain, it doesn’t
necessarilymean that I am damagingmyself’
.
Remember – because of the ways the entire system changes
in order to protect your tissues, we can be confident that
persistent pain does not necessarily reflect the condition of
your tissues. So, if your pain has persisted for longer than
tissues take to heal, then increases in pain are far less
likely to relate to changes in the state of your tissues and
are farmore likely to be due to other threats. (Remember –
threats hide in hard to spot places – page 100.)
In the same way, recurrent pains are often over-protective.
If you have had a recurring pain formany years, each
recurrence does not mean you have re-injured that muscle,
joint, ligament or nerve. It makesmore sense
scientifically
to conclude that recurrences occur because
some cue or set of cues has been sufficient to activate the
virtual representation of the old injury. A little like your
brain checking up on you – like a fire alarm tomake you
check all systems andmake sure your body is OK, safe and
sound. Perhaps the orchestra has decided to play the pain
tune tomake sure it doesn’t forget it.
