How do you know if you are “better”?
If you’ve had pain, had an illness or suffer from a chronic health problem, how do you know, how do you measure, success with care and recovery?
The simple answer is that it depends on your standards.
Most people seek help once they’ve experienced a symptom. A symptom in a healthcare office could range from a low back pain, to incontinence, to blurred vision or sciatica and dizziness. Symptoms are a sign of an underlying problem. You can take medicine to get rid of the symptom, or you can try to correct the underlying cause of the symptom. It’s the difference between patching a hole in your tire with a plug, or replacing the tire. We choose how to alleviate the symptom of an air leak or a back pain.
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If your standards for your life are what we’d consider lower, one might be happy with pain relief, without correcting or managing the underlying issue that led to the symptoms in the first place. It’s a band aid type solution, like a pain killer, that allows you to go about your day but doesn’t prevent recurrence or future melt downs.
If your standards are higher for your own health and life, you may want to fix the underlying issue that led to the symptom, leading to symptom relief and a brighter future that is less likely to involve health problems. In other words, if you replace the tire with the hole, you don’t have to worry about the hole. You’ve completely addressed the underlying cause. The problem is, our bodies don’t allow for replacement parts or transplants of all organs and structures. Our spine and nervous system are a great example.
Once your spine and nervous system degenerate and begin causing problems there’s no “replacement” to correct the underlying issues. Chiropractic care keeps things mobile, reduces inflammation, reduces pain and optimizes position which keeps your spine healthy for the long haul. It’s very effective, but you have to commit to doing the right things. Spine transplants and nerve system transplants don’t exist. Getting a cortisone shot that takes the pain away, is great if your standards and expectations are simply pain relief. Without managing the cause though, you are destined for the problem to return, as injections and medications have short lived results.
The point of this discussion is to help you qualify your results better. If you misjudge pain relief for being a “cure” to your problems, history is almost surely going to repeat itself and like most, you’ll be disappointed. You aren’t better, you just feel better. If you understand that health is a process, much like maintaining healthy teeth, and that addressing underlying causes leads to complete healing, you are on your way to the life you hope for for as long as you should live. There is great reason to be hopeful and expect optimal healing and function, as long as you are willing to invest in yourself. You are worth it. Your body has an amazing healing capacity, given the right environment and assistance toward that goal. Chiropractic care relieves pain by restoring and optimizing function of the cause of dysfunction and pain. It does this without drugs or surgery. If your standards are high, seek solutions to causes and call yourself “better” when the causes of symptoms have been corrected.