Does Feeling No Pain Equal Healthy?

People often spread misconceptions about health among the masses, especially those with no background in healthcare and without the knowledge to dispute inaccurate assertions. It can be dangerous to buy into assumptions like these because they could end up being harmful to your health. Chiropractic care professionals are often confronted by such misconceptions and do their best to debunk them when they arise. Here are a couple of the most common assumptions about your health that are quite inaccurate.

No pain means no problems

The truth is that pain is very often one of the last symptoms to present itself when something is wrong with your body. That means you could have a problem long before you realize it, and you aren’t taking any steps to resolve the issue because you’re not aware there is one. When muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, and tissues become strained enough that you feel pain, that’s when you become aware there is a problem. But the truth is that the problem may have existed long before, and you weren’t aware of it.

In many cases, the problem starts out and gradually builds a little bit each day. Then something might happen to reach a kind of threshold where it becomes bad enough that you feel the pain that has resulted. The moral of this story is that just because you don’t feel any pain, that does not mean that there is no structural issue in your body. This is especially true with issues related to your spine because these can be in effect long before it becomes painful enough for you to recognize there’s an issue.

No pain equals healthy

You may have asked yourself in the past, “Does feeling no pain equal healthy?” The no-pain-equals-healthy idea is a major misconception that a great many people have, but there’s a strong scientific reason why you should never buy into this kind of belief. Here’s why:

• Your brain communicates with every single part of your body by transmitting information through the nervous system encased by your spinal cord.
• All those locations, in turn, transmit information back to the brain, regarding their status, their needs, and their functionality.
• There is only about 11% of all the nerves in your body that are truly capable of transmitting information about pain.
• The other 89% of those nerves continue transmitting data which has absolutely nothing to do with pain.

This means when you’re relying on some kind of bodily indication to tell you what’s going on. It makes no sense to rely on a system that is only 11% capable of providing you with the information you need. The vast majority of the nervous system is absorbed with relaying data that keeps you alive and functional, but which cannot transmit any information about pain.

This makes it pretty much useless to expect that feeling pain will tell you when something is wrong and assuming that everything is fine when you don’t feel any of that pain. A far better strategy would be for your chiropractor to examine you periodically, so you’ll know if anything is wrong with your body.

Regular chiropractic care plans can help keep you healthy and relatively pain free. Schedule your initial consultation now by calling (973) 542-9944 or by filling out our online form.