What I talk to my patients about pain treatment

Recently I decided to move to a new place to experience life in a house for the first time in my life. It is surely a challenge for a person whose entire life was spent in an apartment. Fortunately, I met a wonderful landlord, and later I learned that he had suffered injuries from multiple car accidents. Although the damage those accidents caused to his body was severe, nothing about his appearance reveals it.

I then thought about what I always say to my patients when it comes to the topic of healing the physical pain: Neck pain, shoulder pain, and lower back pain are the most common things patients in America seek help from acupuncturists. Although most of the time the treatments are helpful in reducing the pain, the difference a good acupuncturist makes is always about guiding the patients to have a better lifestyle to benefit further. 

Rarely practitioner talks about what the role of rehabilitation treatment is in this situation. We talk about exercise or strengthening heavily when patients come to us. In fact, most people do PT, chiro, or acupuncture separately or combined to help themselves. Some patients see it as the same as a medication they take to magically help them to remove the pain. I’ve seen many patients reckon the PT sessions as their only time during the week to train themselves. 

If you think about an athlete doing their rehab for an injury, they put hours of hard work everyday to help their function to restore. What the accidents create to the patients are no different than the sports injury, or even worse. But no one takes their rehab as seriously as the athletes. Why? Because they can live with pain if they were given some sort of treatment(I call it bandage). And indeed the effort is so hard to make. Hard, because maybe our willpower is not as good. Hard, also because our body is systemic. So there is no way that, for example, I can train my neck muscles hard without tightening my shoulders. Then we are discouraged, eventually quit.

If anyone want to smartly utilize what your treatment covers,

• the mindset should be: once the damage is done, I have to admit this can be the weakest link of my body almost forever when I age or whenever challenge comes. 
• the best way to utilize the PT, chiro, or acupuncture should be: I will do my training hard to recover. But along the way, if the stiffness/pain occurs because I was doing things wrong I seek help from PT, chiro, or acupuncture to 1.reduce/remove pain so I can train again 2.pick their brain to see what i was doing wrong.