Pain Without Injury

Whether it be waking up with a crick in your neck or having low back pain after sitting too long, pain is there to let you know that your body wasn’t happy with whatever you did with it. However, it’s clear in these instances there was no trauma causing the pain. These are examples where you can have pain, but no injury has taken place. Now there are scenarios where the reciprocal is true, where you can have injury without pain and the other scenario, where you have injury with pain, but we are going to make pain without injury the topic of discussion.

 Pain is very complex and an easy rabbit hole to venture down, so to prevent us all from becoming Alice and getting lost in Wonderland we are going to simplify it as a whistling teapot that alarms you. Similar to a whistling teapot, once your body (the teapot) is heated to a certain threshold it will begin to whistle to alarm you. The factors leading to pain can be compared to the heat leading up to the whistle. In the cases mentioned above, sitting too long or sleeping in an awkward position are factors leading to the whistle, but aren’t the only ones to consider. For figuring out which factors are heating your teapot, we will introduce what’s called the biopsychosocial model and how it affects the pain you might be feeling with the absence of an injury. 

Biological Factors: For the biological portion of the model, you have to consider factors that would physically, chemically, or anatomically affect your body. Here are some examples to consider with biological factors:

• Dysfunctional movements

• Too long in one posture

• Not enough sleep 

• Repetitive movements

• Poor diet

Psychological Factors: For the psychological aspect of the model, consider factors that play a role with emotions that then play a role in the biological portion. A phrase commonly associated with this is “I carry my stress”. Examples of psychological factors might include: 

• Stress

• Fear of pain (avoiding movements)

• Catastrophizing (thinking pain is worse than it is or thinking pain is never going to get better)

• Depression 

• Anxiety 

Social Factors: The last group of factors of the biopsychosocial model to consider are the social factors. These are commonly related to the environment that you are in which then affect the other two factors in the model. Examples of social factors might include:

• Places negatively affecting your emotions

• Environment you work in 

• People you are around

• Time

 Now knowing many factors, it’s easy to see how the more factors you have, the more heat you have applied to your teapot causing your teapot to whistle much quicker and thus pain without injury occurs. Having awareness of these factors is a great first step in reducing the amount of heat applied to your teapot so the threshold of pain isn’t met. If you are struggling with the, much more common, biological factors, at Focus On Health we can address the dysfunctional, repetitive, or lack of movements through care and then solidify this with the Movement Lab making your teapot too large to have these factors heat it up and prevent that whistle of pain from being heard!