Pain doesn’t always represent ongoing physical harm. The nervous system might be firing off erroneous message, or your body’s is having trouble producing its natural painkilling substances. The fear of damage and illness also may distort your nervous system causing you to hurt even more. Understanding the pain is not actually harming your body may not cure your pain but can provide significant relief.
There was a time not long ago when doctors prescribed bed rest as recuperation from, or treatment for, many acute and chronic ailments. While the medical community no longer supports this practice, many laypersons still self-prescribe bed rest for considerable time, only to find their symptoms mysteriously getting worse instead of better. Your body needs movement and the demand it places on its various systems to survive. Inactivity causes bones to lose calcium, a reduction of nutrients to the muscles, joints become stiff or stiffer. This in turn causes the cartilage to deteriorate and arthritic changes to commence and progress.
A comfortable chair is potentially more harmful and destructive to your back than an uncomfortable one for a few important reasons. First and foremost, comfort promotes prolonged sitting. Sitting for 45 minutes or longer puts a damaging amount of pressure onto your lower back, hips, and knees. Also, the lack of movement while seated holds your muscles to short, tight positions to accommodate the posture of sitting. Once you get up and move around, the muscles impose an excessive load on the joints. While prolonged sitting in any type of chair is detrimental to your muscles and joints, ergonomic chairs make a bad situation better. Still, for the best results, get out of your seat and move around every 45 minutes, and don’t be afraid to fidget!
Your physician may claim to have run through all the available options and there is simply nothing more to be done. In reality, there is a vast number of treatments that can drastically reduce your pain or limit its impact on your life. Take pain pills for example. If you’ve tried one type of drug that worked well but gave you undesirable side effects, there are other drugs in that same class of medication that could have a very different effect on you chemically. Perhaps drugs aren’t the best type of treatment for you. Some form of nerve distraction therapy, such as acupuncture, yoga or massage, may ease your pain much more effectively. The main thing to keep in mind is that there are more options to fight chronic pain than even your physician may know. If your doctor makes you feel like a pest for asking about pain control, you should look for another one.
Chronic pain is different than other disorders. In most cases, there isn’t one single problem we can point to. This makes diagnosis difficult and sometimes even impossible. Chronic pain is usually the result of several things going wrong – chemical, mechanical, and neurological – and your state of mind can also affect the degree of pain you're feeling. The key is finding your own chronic pain solution, integrating a group of well-chosen therapies.