Besides the odd animals that lack a nervous system, like sponges and fungi, having a functional nervous system has helped every creature survive over the course of time. A nervous system allows all animals to feel and differentiate touch, temperature, pressure, chemicals, and maybe most importantly ... pain.
Hands-on therapies such as joint manipulation and soft tissue therapy can cause temporary soreness that can linger after a treatment. This is because with so much movement and physical response to an area that is tender or not moving well, the body’s nervous system continues to send the mechanoreceptors (receptors for mechanical pressure) signals to the brain hours or days after treatment.
An injury can also modify how much the pain receptors send signals to the brain. In my blog post titled, “How does pain even work?”, I talked about how the tissue thresholds and pain thresholds change post-injury. These thresholds lower causing a decrease in the amount of force it takes to cause damage and increases the sensitivity of the receptors for pain (nociceptors). This is a great way for the body to tell you what is a little too much or what could be damaging.
For example, let’s say you roll your ankle. A stretch or exercise that is given to you as part of your treatment plan could cause some pain signals as you go through the motion. The pain itself doesn’t mean that any damage is being caused in the tissue, instead, they are signals to the brain reminding you that there was an injury and to be wary of how you move. I always like to give the traffic light image for what is a healing level of pain and what can be harmful.
A traffic light is green, yellow, and red. These three levels can be used to say what is good, what is moderate, and what is bad. If 10 out of 10 is an unbearable amount of pain, the green level is anything that is rated as a 0-3. This is a perfectly normal amount of pain that the body can move through injury free.
Yellow light is when the pain scale is between 4 to 5 out of 10. This is a cautionary level of pain that the body is telling you, “be careful and slow down”. A pain scale of 5 out of 10 may be too much when an injury is acute and I recommend listening to your body and reducing the force or speed of the movement to a more comfortable level.
The red light is the classic “STOP” level. This pain scale is anything between 6 and 10 out of 10. The body is very good at telling you when too much is too much. If this is the case, continue to move in your comfort zone but be mindful to reduce the load of the stretch or the exercise.
Follow the traffic lights, and keep on moving,
Dr. Cole Maranger, DC
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