Why Your MRI Might Be Lying to You About Your Pain 🛑

Your MRI might be lying to you, and I'm gonna tell you why. If you've had pain for an extended period of time in your knee or your lower back or your shoulder or anywhere else in your body, you may have gone to the doctor and they may have done an MRI or an x-ray. Now, what those images show is what's happening internally. It shows us if there's damage to the bones or the muscles or the ligaments or the tendons or any other tissues in there. And that can be scary. It can be scary just to go through the process of getting those pictures taken But it can be even more scary if you see something. But there's a simple concept that needs to be understood to really control your pain, and that is that the amount of damage that there is or isn't in your body does not equate to the amount of pain that you should feel. They are 2 separate things. Here's why. Your brain works on a spectrum. It has 2 sides to it. One side is all about safety and protection, and and survival. The other side is about movement and performance. Now, the brain really can only slide along that scale at certain times. So, if something is wrong or it feels in danger, it's gonna slide towards the side of safety and protection, which is gonna limit how well you move and how well you're able to perform in your activities physically. Once we can clear that up, we can slide the brain to the other side of the spectrum and we can move better. The catch here is that the brain will always try to slide towards the protective side when it's in doubt. So if there is some damage, the brain may slide over, and if you're thinking, oh, this is worse than it actually is, your perception of the pain may even slide further into protection. So let me elaborate on that a little bit more. I want you to think of your pain as an alarm system. It is telling you when there is potential danger. There doesn't even have to be real danger there, but it's telling you if there's something that could go wrong or something is wrong, and it will tell you at a certain volume, and it will tell you that so that you stop doing what you're doing. Now, if you continue to try and push through that pain, sometimes the pain tends to get worse, and if you've gone back for a second set of MRIs or X-rays, They may say, no, it's not worse, or maybe it's even a little bit better, and you're sitting there saying, well, hey, my pain's a little bit worse. I don't know why this is happening. It's because there's not a correlation. There have been numerous studies done on this topic. For example, there was a study where they took MRIs of people's backs of all ages, and they found that the older you get, the more likely it is you have a disc issue or some kind of malformation in the tissues In your spine. The catch with that study was that every single one of these people was asymptomatic. Nobody had any pain. So they bring those to doctors in some of these studies, and doctors will say, yes, this person needs surgery, this person needs surgery. And in fact, none of them needed surgery because there was no real pain issue. People were still moving. There was no danger from those issues that showed up in the MRI. There's been other studies where the images have shown that there's no damage and people are still in pain, and there's got to be a reason for that, right? If it's so frustrating for a patient to go see the doctor who's in pain and the doctor to say, there's nothing here, I don't see any problems, I don't know why you're in pain. These are issues that all fall into this category, okay? Let me give you an example. If you have a paper cut, that can hurt, and it's a tiny little scratch barely breaking the surface of the skin. Now, if that equals that much pain, then why is it that a giant bruise on your thigh doesn't hurt more when you could have not even known when you got that bruise? Another example I use in my book, Rewiring Pain, Is if you're walking across the street and you step in a pothole and you roll your ankle, you've now damaged that ankle, you've sprained it, and maybe you're even on the ground going, oh no, I don't think I can walk, but you look up and here comes a bus barreling down the street at you. Guess what you're gonna do? You're not gonna think about that ankle. You're gonna get up and run off the street to save yourself because the brain is protecting you. Now, will the ankle hurt later? Maybe, but why didn't it hurt in that moment when you just damaged it? It's because the brain controls how much pain you feel, and it's doing whatever it needs to do to protect you right now. So I want you to start taking a different approach to how you're thinking about your pain. Instead of thinking about if there's pain, there must be damage, I want you to think about your brain in 2 ways, more like a computer. You have hardware. Those are your bones. Those are your muscles, your nerves, your ligaments, your tissues, everything inside of you, even your skin. And then you also have your software, and that's your nervous system. If the hardware isn't damaged but the nervous system is overreacting, then there's another way to approach that. We have to go figure out what in the nervous system is not working. Now, on the flip side of that, if If there is damage to the hardware and we are getting an inappropriate response in terms of pain, then we also need to approach that through the nervous system. Because ultimately, if something hurts on or in your body, that's not what's really hurting. It's the representation of that in your brain. And there's a whole pathway from where it starts to where it ends up. And if that pathway is kinked like a hose, then the information is not flowing properly, and you're going to end up with the brain saying, that's not safe, and it's going to slide more to that protective mechanism, and it's going to give you a pain response or whatever loud response it needs to give you until you go and do something different. So let's take a different approach and think about how can we impact the software Versus the hardware. This is gonna be working with the senses mostly and the nerves. So think about what keeps us safe first. If you're walking through a forest and you hear something crawling through the bushes, you're gonna be on alert, right? Now your system is saying, okay. If you're hearing something that's not what's really there, your system's gonna go on alert and you're really still safe. So working with how well you hear, working with how well you see, because again, if you see something that's moving in those bushes, you're going to be on high alert, but it might just be the wind. If you are having issues with balance and maybe you're afraid of falling, the ground is a danger to you. So we need to appropriately train the vestibular system, which is your inner ear balancing system. And these are just a few examples of different things that we can do to help your brain feel safer, and then in turn reduce your pain. So if you're interested in learning more about this, I've written this book called Rewiring Pain. I'll leave the link in the description below. And this dives into exactly what we're talking about here. How do we make you feel safer with all these other nervous system exercises? How can we incorporate those exercises into your traditional exercises or your day-to-day activities? There are hundreds of different approaches in here and not every approach is right for everybody, but there is a questionnaire here in the back and it will tell you exactly where to start, which chapter to read first, and the different drills that you can do In order to improve your pain. So go ahead and check this out, and if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. And until next time, live healthy.