How long will it take until I am better, fixed, or out of pain?
In today’s society, we are used to getting everything immediately and many find waiting to be pretty difficult. However, when it comes to healing, we do not always get immediate results. Even if our pain goes away quickly, it does not mean the problem does. Patience is essential when it comes to healing from an illness or injury. Just like the phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, your injury will not heal in a day either. Time and repetition are the main factors to heal from most injuries and illnesses like headaches, neck pain, and back pain.
Each patient’s injuries and aches are unique and will respond in a different way to chiropractic care; however, regular chiropractic care has been shown to decrease all types of pain. Many people have had multiple injuries or traumas within their bodies that are left untreated. These cause imbalances in the nervous and musculoskeletal system causing other muscles, ligaments, or regions of the spine to compensate for the areas in pain. However, once your body reaches its maximum threshold for the imbalance it can no longer endure the stress, and this is when you may feel pain from injuries that occurred many years ago. Our chiropractors identify areas in your body that are not functioning normally due to previous injuries.
It is also important to remember healing is not linear, it is if full of setbacks. A setback can be caused by a range of things either external or internal. For example, if you aggravate an old injury or condition again. Many times, people want to rush the healing process. I am mean who doesn’t want to feel better right away? However, this often causes people to do too much too soon and not allow their injury to heal enough and the progress is halted. Healing occurs in alternating cycles of repair and recovery. It is common to see symptoms flare up during these cycles, so it is important to be patient while you are healing.
There are different phases of healing in order to get your body back to optimal health. The first stage is the relief phase. The relief phase focuses on getting you out of pain and to start adjusting your spine in the right alignment. This is followed by the corrective phase which helps build new muscle memory patterns to continue to help correct spinal alignment. The third stage is the strengthening phase. This stage helps strengthen muscles and hold the spine in the correct position. The last stage is wellness care. Wellness care helps maintain the body and requires regular adjustments to help keep the body healthy! The length of these stages differs for everyone but in the end you should have a healthy functioning body!
When we begin to get better, we often forget to continue our self-care. It is important to choose to continue to care for yourself, whether it is through a spa day or a chiropractic adjustment to alleviate stress. It is not only your chiropractors’ job to care about booking in your adjustments, but it is also yours! At Balanced Spine Chiropractic, we assess every patient and determine their care plan. Care plans consist of regular visits over a period of time to help heal your body. It is important to remember that most problems didn’t start overnight so it is hard to expect them to heal overnight!