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Pain
Do we listen to its signal?
Pain: Your Body’s Built-In Warning System
Pain is one of the body’s oldest and most important protective mechanisms. It isn’t your enemy. It is a messenger.
Imagine walking barefoot across your living room and accidentally kicking the corner of the coffee table. The sharp pain that shoots through your toe isn’t there to punish you, it is there to protect you. Within fractions of a second, nerves carry a signal to your brain, telling you that cells and tissue have been injured. Your body immediately encourages you to stop what you’re doing. Protect the area and allow it to heal.
This is acute pain, and it serves an essential purpose for both protection and survival.
The problem arises when we stop thinking of pain as information and begin viewing it as something that simply needs to be eliminated. Over the past several decades, this mindset has increasingly influenced modern medicine. Around the turn of the century, pain was widely promoted as the “fifth vital sign,” emphasizing the importance of recognizing and treating it. While this movement helped address the undertreatment of pain, it also contributed, in some settings, to an emphasis on suppressing pain rather than understanding why it existed in the first place.
From an evolutionary perspective, pain is not a design flaw, it is a sophisticated communication system. It evolved to capture our attention, protect us from further injury, and encourage behaviors that promote healing. When we focus solely on silencing the signal without investigating its source, we risk missing the very message our bodies are trying to deliver, and deliver it will.
Pain is information
Every pain signal is your body’s way of saying, “Something isn’t quite right.”
Sometimes the cause is obvious like a sprained ankle, a cut, a burn, or a broken bone.
Other times the message is much more subtle.
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Dr. M
