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If you have been dealing with lingering discomfort, or pain sensation, this article is for you. Whether you have just injured yourself, want to recover faster, increase performance or looking to an affordable way to take care of yourself, discover a different world of healing.
In this article, we will explore how you can identify your relationship with pain, your choices around healing, and misunderstandings to save time in your healing process.
If you're ready, let's start with a story where you decide the outcome.
Does this sound familiar?
An athlete has been experiencing intense knee pain for over 10 months, just below the kneecap, whenever he straightens his leg or puts load on it. His knee swells randomly and produces crazy cracking sounds, especially when he tries to sit on his heels.
He describes his pain at a high level of (7/10) that increases with movement and doesn't go away with passive rest, clay poultices, hot or cold therapy, and even shockwaves on the kneecap from the physiotherapist.
What would you do next ?
Nothing and probably take pills for the pain
Rest or reduce movement
Do more exams, medical tests, and explorations
Look for the root cause of the pain in the situation
- If you chose:
Nothing and take pills for the pain :
You might be more focused on the symptoms rather than the cause, overlooking the source of the issue. This is very common and can lead to dependence on medication without finding a root cause of pain.
Rest or reduce movement :
This can make sense to alleviate pain in an acute injury and prevent aggravation, like a bone fracture or a massive muscular lesion. In this story, especially at this stage, that's not the case, and it would ultimately be an avoidance strategy for the problem: rest and reducing movements don't always resolve situations. You may have heard of people who rested for months and still experience painful sensations.
Do more exams, medical tests, and explorations :
Medical exams are a great tool in the case of an emergency to determine if a surgery is necessary ; like we saw previously in the case of bone fracture or a massive muscular lesion.
But watch out: outside of this specific contexts of emergency, if you run exams for your pain, you usually get in to two situations :
1. In the first one, they could find something is on the picture, but it doesn't necessarily means that it's related to your issue. Further considerations are needed. It could have been there months and years before.
2. If in the second case, they don't see anything, it doesn't mean your pain doesn't exist. We can probably rationally explain what's going on by searching for the root of it.
Look for the root cause of the pain in the situation:
By looking for the root cause you can start to understand and treat the issues instead of the symptoms. The issues can stem from movement, outside factors, emotions, behaviors and more. The essential thing is to test the paths we choose, to experience them and form our own point of view.
A story like many others .
If we get back to the athlete and his painful knee, you might wonder why we chose this situation. Actually, because I lived it. This is my story.
After living with acute pain, evolving into chronic pain for months, I began to honestly examine the behaviors that had led me to this situation.
My lack of awareness and bodily overload had led to this issue: just before the acute knee injury, I hadn't prepared for the intensity of the activities I had imposed on my body. I had played an intense basketball game, followed by six other games in a tournament, and ended with a 4-hour standing concert, all in the same day.
My body had sent warning signals through muscle pain and tension in my legs that I chose to ignore. Eventually, my body reacted with a striking sensation in both knees in the following weeks. I took rest, but after months, the pain did not subside on the left. What would have been considered acute inflammation by health professionals persisted.
Considering the whole picture, I believe we can agree that it happened due to an overuse of my body with a lack of attentive care and regular preventive measures. Focusing on these behaviors and lack of awareness might prevent making the same mistake, but it didn't solve the crisis.
So, how to proceed?
To manage this months-long crisis, the focus needed to be on muscles and self-massage.
How self-massage got rid of the problem.
In a healthy body, in the absence of injury or major trauma, the muscle areas responsible for pain often appear as sensitive points in the muscles called "trigger points." These trigger points in the muscles create pain at a distance from the point itself, often giving the illusion of joint pain a bit lower. They respond very well to self-massage.
It is crucial to understand that too few people are truly aware of this.
To try to alleviate my pain, I began experimenting with self-massage regularly and systematically.
Daily self-massage of the thigh gradually and significantly reduced the pain under the kneecap. Swelling disappeared, cracking reduced, and my strength and mobility increased. And guess what, my age did not regress.
It wasn't magical; I had to test, adapt, be consistent. That's how I integrated this routine into my daily life, especially around activities where I exert considerable effort on my legs, and I paid a little more attention to the activities I demanded from my body.
This decision was significant for my well-being on a daily basis and in the long run.
Daily self-massage of my thigh gradually and significantly reduced the pain.
In Summary .
This lived experience is very common. It's shared by numerous athletes in our close or distant circles who engage in activities involving jumps, supports, and sudden changes of direction. This knee example translates to all parts of the body and activities. Some narrowly avoided exploratory surgery. It's just one story among many, showing that even though each person is unique, we often become blind to the fundamental problems fueling our pain.
Relieving your pain is a personal adventure, linked to your history, habits, and awareness of your own body. Self-massage is an extraordinary tool often underestimated and within everyone's reach.
If you're tired of struggling with pain, you can start here to initiate a change, explore at your own pace the self-massages and techniques that make a difference.
