Healing Isn’t Linear
Welcome back to this week’s blog post!
In our waiting room you will find a sign that reads “Healing isn’t Linear.” One of the more common questions I get asked is “why am I not better yet?” There is no process in the body that does not require time. In the case of musculoskeletal issues, some of those changes take years or even decades to develop. A process that takes time to develop will also take time to reverse its course.
An analogy that I will sometimes use to illustrate is consider when you are driving and hit a nail, it does not go all the way through, so you do not lose pressure. You continue to drive on it for miles. So long in fact, that you forget the nail was there at all. Then one day you hit a bump in the road that drives the nail through, and you begin to slowly lose pressure. Even still, the tire is drivable you just need to air up your tires occasionally. Then one day, you hit another bump and that finishes your tire, and your tire goes completely flat. Now, when did the tire become compromised? The initial “injury” occurred when you initially hit the nail, yet it did not require immediate attention until it began to lose pressure some extended time later.
We often take the same approach to our bodies. We have that “nail in the tire” that we notice as an ache or tight muscle but ignore it as it fades. That does not mean the problem actually went away, that dysfunction in our movement patterns is likely still there, but we keep “putting more miles” on that injury until we hit that proverbial bump resulting in a flair up. This flair up may be “treated” with pain medications, a heating pad, or even a massage gun. These simply mask the symptoms of the dysfunction, giving us enough relief to let us believe that it’s helping. Sometimes doing these temporary relief techniques passes until we hit another “bump” this time, however, our tire deflates, and we have an injury that needs attention. This is the state that most people seek chiropractic care.
When people typically reach out for chiropractic care, they have likely put “many miles” on their injury. This, in terms of chiropractic care, is many less-than-optimal movement patterns. Over time the body develops muscle memory to compensate for these “bad” movement patterns. The job of the chiropractor is to determine where the breakdown in the movement pattern is occurring. This is also why you may feel pain in one area, but we are focusing on something else entirely. What you might be feeling is the compensation patterns that have developed as a result of the initial injury.
In order to retrain your body to move more optimally, we need to repeatedly correct and restore movement to the restricted areas to reeducate the body and rebuild proper muscle memory within those movement patterns. Depending on how long your body was functioning less optimally, and how ingrained those movement patterns are, this may take several “corrections” in order to properly reeducate your movement patterns and develop muscle memory through those patterns. In general, I usually estimate one third to one half of the time you were aware of a chronic condition (longer than 3 months). So, if a patient has had a condition that they’ve had for one year, I usually estimate 4-6 months for true resolution.
The absence of pain is not full resolution. We will be discussing this further in future blogs.
Yours in Health,
Dr. Grant Shelton, DC
Doctor of Chiropractic
