Scientists agree: brain function is central to the pain experience.
The brain calculates and evaluates all of the signals that come from your body. The incoming signals aren’t experienced as painful until your brain decides they are.
That’s why optimal pain therapy must modify the way the brain processes the signals coming from your joints, muscles, and internal organs.
The brain’s main source of information
Your brain knows what’s going on in the outside world largely from the senses of vision and hearing.
But our highly-evolved senses of sight and hearing don’t tell us much about the internal state of the body. Our internal map of ourselves, and the main signals that feed into the brain’s pain processing system, come from mechanoreceptor nerve endings in your muscles, joints, ligaments, and the walls of internal organs.
Mechanoreceptors nerve endings respond to changes in the length or stiffness of these tissues. When your muscles or joints are stretched, twisted, or compacted, the nerves send information to the brain about the stresses they experience. This mechanoreceptor feedback is one of the main information sources the brain uses to calculate your internal state and evaluate it as painful or not painful.
The power of manual therapy in the treatment of pain
Manual therapy – hands on treatment of the body tissues – is one of the most potent methods to modulate the pain response because it directly stimulates mechanoreceptors in your connective tissues.
The hands-on stimulation of these nerve endings sends fresh information to the brain – and the brain begins to map a new internal picture of what’s going on in your body.
My specialty treatment method for pain, incorporating a diverse spectrum of manual therapy methods, is supported by the latest scientific research and is grounded in more than thirty-five years of experience in helping patients overcome the most challenging pain problems.
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