Warning Signs That Something May Be Amiss With Your Spine
The Paradox Of Symptoms
Most of us, at one time or another, have had the experience of being told that the tyres on our cars are wearing unevenly. This is a symptom indicating a problem. Now we could massage the involved tyres, inject them with some chemical, or the more costly thing would be to buy a new tyre. However, if we do nothing about the problem's cause, little changes. Similarly, if a lamp alerts you that your vehicle is getting low on oil, that is a sign that trouble may be looming.
In the body, symptoms can also indicate that all is not well, but what is different is that they may be a sign that the body is functioning well and doing its job. So symptoms are actually a feedback mechanism that lets us know both the good and the bad of what is happening. The same sign can be useful in one instance and detrimental in another. Sometimes we may not know which type it is, but in our quest to seek pleasure and avoid pain, we try to eliminate what distresses us.
If you ever have a fever, that is often a good strategy the body uses to elevate the temperature and burn out bacterial or viral toxins. In this case, the body is doing its job. In this case, trying to lower the fever is working against the body.
What if you decided after an absence of five years that you would start running again, and instead of one kilometre, you chose to run five the first time. The following day or two, you could experience a lot of muscle soreness in your legs and some inflammation in your ankle joints. That is the body's way of limiting you so that you have enough time to repair some of the minor damage. That is a positive feedback mechanism. Assuming you didn't tear any muscles, you are experiencing "good" pain.
Commonly, we experience symptoms as a way for the body to protect us. Diarrhoea, a runny nose with cold and swollen lymph glands, is often how the body fights foreign invaders such as viruses or bacteria and brings things back to normalcy––what we call homeostasis. The enigma is that those same swollen glands may indicate a severe disease process.
Headaches are another example that may confuse us. A brain tumour could cause pain in the head, but so could dehydration. In chiropractic, we see many people with headaches and other ailments which may be related to the spine. The origin of the headaches can be perplexing at times, but commonly the reasons are not sinister.
So a common question I would hear over the years is:
"WHY SHOULD I COME IN IF I DON'T HURT?"
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