The Importance Of Listening ToYour “Check- Engine Light”

The following is adapted from Your Body, a User’s Manual by Laurie Meinholz.

Imagine having to go to work as a construction worker and trying to get your job done while you have a pounding headache. All that you hear inside your head all day is thud, thud, thud. The whole time your head is pounding, your co-workers are pounding nails and running power tools right next to you, hollering to each other on the job site. Throughout the day, you load up on painkillers to ease the pain, but there is no change in your headache. You go home at night and try to play with your kids, be a good husband, and do yard work, but your headache is still there. You go to bed, finally fall asleep, and wake up again the next morning with the same headache. It is there all day at work and follows you home again. It is there when you try to play with your kids. It is there when you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning.

This goes on for twenty-five years.

Through the years, you try different over-the-counter medications, but none of them help. You try prescription drugs, but they do not lessen the pain. Then you try acupuncture, massage therapy, physical therapy, and targeting pressure points. Nothing helps. After a few years, you get concerned and go for an MRI just to be sure you don’t have a tumor, but everything looks fine. While you are relieved that the MRI is clear, you are still haunted by the headache. At this point, all you’re looking for is an answer, no matter how bad the news may be.

Having a daily pounding headache is your new normal. You know that nobody can help. You tell yourself that you are just unlucky. It must be your genetics. You must be getting old. Through the years, you consider switching professions, but this is the only skill you know.

Then, somehow, you end up at a chiropractor. You don’t think it will help, but you figure it cannot hurt anything. After your first spinal adjustment, the twenty-five-year-old headache loosens its grip on you before you even get home.

You haven’t had a headache since.

I know that there are many people out there who struggle with constant headaches. In fact, 85 percent of headaches are caused by spinal stress that can be improved with a single adjustment.

I do not like to see people suffer. Seeing people suffer is one of the hardest parts of my job. But I do like it when people are in pain. Yes, you read that right. I like it when people are in pain. Pain is a good thing to feel. Pain alerts us that something is going wrong within the body. From there, you have to find out why you have the pain, so it does not turn into chronic pain.

There are two rules in my office. When you are hurt or sick:

1. You cannot blame being old.
2. You cannot blame genetics.

Every day in the United States, we are told that the older we get, the more aches and pains we should have. This statement is both true and false. If you take care of your body when you are young, you should not hurt as you age. If you do not take care of your body and allow problems to pile up, then yes, the older you get, the more of a problem they become and the more pain you will have. Pain is not related to the aging process but to how well you have maintained your body over the years. With proper maintenance, you can live pain free. Even if you have not taken care of your body, it’s never too late to start.

Believe it or not, your body is actually designed to become healthier and stronger as you age. Not weaker.

There are cultures in the world where the strongest and most fit people are the elders. One example is the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico. In this tribe, those who are over fifty are faster and stronger runners. The older people will run with, train, and teach the younger runners. Contrast this to the US culture, where we mostly believe that, at fifty, you are considered old and incapable when it comes to physical strength. In the US, we tell people at fifty, “Slow down and don’t use your body so much!” — whereas the Tarahumara tribe says the exact opposite. It is because of cultures like this that I do not allow patients to blame pain on their age.

There are very few genetic conditions that can cause pain and sickness. The majority of people do not have them. We will get more into this later.

Here is one thing I want you to understand: you have pain for a reason. Every single thing the body does, it does for a reason. Remember, your body never does anything by accident and never does anything wrong.

Pain is easy to brush off. You could say that pain is the body’s way of punishing you or that your body does not like you. But the body does not give you pain to spite you or make you miserable. Your body does not put you through more pain simply because you are aging. You do not get pain due to bad luck or because your parents had the same pain. And for the majority of people, you do not inherit pain from your bad genetics. There are a few genetic conditions that can cause an increased amount of pain, but so few of these exist that I do not allow anyone to blame their pain on their genetics.

When people feel pain, their instinct is to get rid of the pain as soon as possible. The worse the pain is, the more desperate they are to get rid of it. When people are in this state of mind, they don’t care what rids them of the pain, as long as it goes away, even if relief is only temporary. It could be pain pills, massages, herbs, medical marijuana, muscle relaxers, Biofreeze, alcohol, illegal drugs, prescription drugs, etc. Oftentimes the body just flushes these out of the system, so the cycle continues.

While getting out of pain is always the goal, we need to make sure we don’t get out of pain too soon. Pain is one of the ways that our body communicates with us. Pain is also how the body limits us from making the injury worse.

Throwing out your lower back is a great example. I know, from personal experience, it hurts a lot. When I threw out my lower back, my muscle spasms were so bad that I could not stand up straight and had to crawl into my chiropractor’s office. Although painful, those muscle spasms were a protective mechanism to make sure the injury did not get worse or create any more damage; therefore, taking muscle relaxers is not the best idea because it allows more movement leading to further injury. If you add pain medication on top of muscle relaxers, not only will you not have protective muscle spasms, but you will also not feel any pain related to the injury. By doing this, you will turn off all sensors for pain throughout your entire body.

Pain can actually work to your advantage if you understand it and can learn to work with it.

Within the body, there are thousands of things that happen every single second in order to coordinate all the daily actions of the body. Your brain receives three trillion pieces of information per second, to be exact. Information from every single cell in your body reports back up to the brain every single second. Your conscious or thinking brain can only interpret fifty pieces of information per second! That means the majority of information from your body never reaches your conscious brain!

So, how do we know what reaches your conscious brain and what does not? And what does the conscious brain pick to pay attention to?

Imagine what it must feel like to be the brain every second. It would be as though you are standing out in an open field and have 500 kids running up to you all at once, shouting to you about what they did that day or what they need. How do you decide which kids to listen to?

There are two different ways: The first way is that you are going to listen to the kids who run the fastest and get to you first. Then you are going to start scanning the crowd looking for emergencies. If you notice that a kid in the back of the group is bleeding from the head, you will listen to that kid over the one right next to you who is telling you about their pet cat.

Your brain does the same thing. Your brain interprets the first fifty bits of information it receives, as well as any urgent messages that come along.

This means that the pain you are feeling either:

1. Traveled faster than the other signals in your body to your brain, or
2. Is an urgent message that something is very wrong.

Because your conscious brain cannot interpret all of the signals coming from your body at once, it is possible that your severe lower back pain could be overshadowing another issue in your body. You can have pain or injuries that you do not feel because they are not as fast or as urgent as other injuries.

To learn more about how to maintain your health you can find Your Body, a User’s Manual on Amazon.

Dr. Laurie Meinholz is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chiropractor who owns and operates Nordic Chiropractic in Decorah, Iowa. Dr. Laurie donates 100 percent of the profits from Nordic Chiropractic to local charities nominated by her patients. She is a member of the board of the International Federation of Chiropractors and Organizations (IFCO).

In 2019, Dr. Laurie started the Decorah Running Club to promote health and wellness in her community. Her goal is to help every person she works with become pain free. When you live without pain, you can be your best self, enjoy closer relationships, improve your performance at work, and reclaim the life of your dreams.