Welcome back. What I'd like to discuss with you today is our symptoms. It seems like a word that we all know, but the reality is as you come into the office you're going to maybe here one patient talking about headaches and another talking about neck pain, low back pain, tingling into their hands, sciatic nerve or nerve pain into the leg/knee pain. Then you're going to think how do all of these conditions relate to the back or to chiropractic? So I'd like to discuss symptoms with you a little bit and the reality is that our goal is to help YOU with YOUR symptoms or whatever has brought YOU into the office but I have a saying that I use all the time. The symptoms really aren't the problem what's causing the symptoms is the problem. What I mean by that is you know if your neck is hurting that's not good and I don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it, none of us want to be in pain but the reality is that what's causing that neck to hurt is really the problem. The body doesn't just randomly create pain and so symptoms are really our body's way of talking to us and telling us that something is wrong and we need some kind of intervention or to do something or to rest something that it needs to heal. The way I like to explain it is think about it like a light in the dash board of your car; you know if I'm going down the road and the check engine light comes on there's a couple options there, right? I mean one is you can unplug the wire to the check engine light and the other is you can put a piece of tape over the check engine light and then you don't see it anymore but the reality is neither one of those things fix what caused the check engine light to come on. If I just continue on and cover up the light or unplug the light, whatever the true problem is, is going to get worse until I become stranded along the road and unfortunately that's how we handle our health a lot of the time. Something starts to bother us, it starts to hurt, we wait a few days it starts to be unresolved and then we typically resort to medication first to try to cover up the pain or numb the pain I guess in an attempt to let the body heal itself. Sometimes you know if we take the medication for a couple weeks maybe the pain is gone and we think okay while it's healed but the question is did it heal right or did it heal wrong? If the pain just covered as the medication just covered up the pain or the inflammation long enough for the body to heal maybe it healed the situation wrong or with scarred tissue that's going to lead to further degeneration or problems down the road. So really what makes what we do unique and different is our exams are designed to find the cause of your problem and then address the cause. Now there may sometimes be faster or cheaper ways to cover up the paint it may be cheaper to just take a pill and cost less time and less energy but the reality is what the long-term consequences of that are? All too often we see people that present to the office with already permanent degenerative changes in their spine or a joint in their body that could have been resolved had a problem been corrected properly the first time. Don’t think of symptoms as being something wrong, think of symptoms as almost a good thing, like this is an opportunity to your body's telling you “hey I need to do something and fix something” and the good news is that you're here which means you are directly addressing the cause and you are getting to the bottom of the problem. So have a great day look forward to seeing you next time thanks for choosing Mills Chiropractic Center!
