![\"tumor\"](\"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/tumor.jpg\")
<\/p>\nInjuries are an unfortunate part of sport.\u00a0 No matter how hard we try to prepare athletes prior to competition, sometimes injuries happen.<\/p>\n
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It\u00a0is commonly thought that pain and injury have a one-to-one relationship \u2013 IE, I twist my ankle and\u00a0I get pain.\u00a0 While this may be so in some situations (especially acute situations like an ankle sprain),\u00a0it is important to remember that\u00a0pain is a lot\u00a0more complex than that.\u00a0 Pain doesn\u2019t exist in your muscles, joints, or ligaments.\u00a0 Rather, pain exists in your brain (and like Arnold says, \u201cit\u2019s not a tumor\u201d\u2026.well, sometimes it\u00a0might be a tumor!).<\/p>\n
Pain is an important aspect for our survival.\u00a0 It tells us something is wrong.\u00a0 In fact, if you did have a brain tumor, those intense headaches that are the source of your pain would force you to go to the doctor, get a thorough evaluation, and then get appropriately treated.\u00a0 However, sometimes the signals of pain can get crossed.<\/p>\n
What about those people that for whatever reason aren\u2019t having pain when faced with a life threatening condition?\u00a0 For example, the people who have cancer eating away their stomach, yet experience no pain at all, until it is to late, only\u00a0to find out about the problem a week or two before they pass away.\u00a0 Where was their pain?\u00a0 Where was their warning sign?<\/p>\n
What about the people that are always in pain yet there doesn\u2019t appear to be anything medically wrong?\u00a0 What gives?!\u00a0 Why are they so\u00a0prone to feeling pain?<\/p>\n
Pain is a\u00a0multi-factorial process and takes into account several of the bodies systems collectively feeding information, in the form of signals, to the brain.\u00a0 These signals are bombarding the brain with information and the brain is basically filtering things out and deciding what to react too based on everything else going on \u2013 which signals present a potential threat?\u00a0 (Think about the soldier who gets shot but doesn\u2019t realize it because there is the chaos of war going on aruond him.)<\/em>\u00a0 I liken this to those in charge of\u00a0investigating every single terrorist threat that the USA receives daily.\u00a0 They have to filter out all those threats and decide what is not worth reacting upon and what is really important.\u00a0 They can\u2019t react to everything, right?<\/p>\n This collection of inputs and outputs from various systems has been termed the\u00a0neuromatrix\u00a0<\/em>by pain researcher Ronald Melzack.\u00a0 This information can be better understood by spending sometime studying the below diagram.<\/p>\n As you can see, many factors\/systems affect pain \u2013 visual, sensory, endocrine, vestibular, past experience, anxiety, depression, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n Based on what we know of the\u00a0neuromatrix\u00a0<\/em>model it is important that we appreciate and respect the fact that the body consists of many systems that are all dependant on each other and work together to support healthy function.\u00a0 Whenever we try and distill things down to one single system as the\u00a0\u201cproblem\u201d\u00a0<\/em>we end up missing a lot of other stuff going on.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this is how anatomy and physiology is taught.\u00a0 You go through chapters devoted to one single system \u2013 circulatory, lymphatic, nervous, integumentary, musculoskeletal, etc \u2013 but no one seems to teach you how to put it all together and how to address or manage these systems collectively, especially when there is something wrong.<\/p>\n Because pain is created by the brain as a result of information received from these systems, when dealing with athletes in pain, it would be appropriate to keep all of this in mind and not just focus on one element in the equation, but rather try and see the big picture (the full human).<\/p>\n Just some things to ponder.<\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Melzack R.\u00a0From the Gate to the Neuromatrix.\u00a0<\/strong>Pain\u00a0<\/em>1999; Supplment 6: S121-S126.<\/p>\n Melzack R.\u00a0Pain and the Neuromatrix in the Brain.\u00a0<\/strong>J Dental Education\u00a0<\/em>2001; 65(12): 1378-1382.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Injuries are an unfortunate part of sport.\u00a0 No matter how hard we try to prepare athletes prior to competition, sometimes injuries happen. It\u00a0is commonly thought that pain and injury have a one-to-one relationship \u2013 IE, I twist my ankle and\u00a0I get pain.\u00a0 While this may be so in some situations (especially acute situations like an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strength-and-conditioning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Neuromatrix\"](\"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Neuromatrix.jpg\")
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