Let’s start at the beginning. Pain is your body’s way of alerting you that something may be wrong. It’s like your body is saying, “Hey, pay attention, something’s going on here.” It is an inherent mechanism meant to protect you.
For example if you touch a hot stove, receptor nerve cells alert your brain to the heat and you instinctively pull your hand away from the stove to protect yourself from being burned. How quickly you react to the pain signal will determine how severely you are burned.
The same is true for common musculoskeletal pain that we all experience, be it in your back, neck, hips, knees, and so on. When you are feeling pain, your body is telling you to pay attention because something is not right. Ideally, you would stop doing whatever is causing the pain. But what happens when you don’t stop?
Toughing it Out
When you experience pain, you have a few choices. You can make a physical change to what you’re doing to eliminate the pain, you can take pain medications to get some relief, or you can just ignore the pain and tough it out.
Let’s say that you’re working in the yard on a beautiful spring weekend. You’ve spent the day bending, pulling, scooping, and lifting. At the end of the day, you are in pain. What do you do? In most cases, resting, pu ...
