00:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Hello, you guys. Welcome to episode two of tissue talk. I’m going to wait for you guys to get on . See who’s jumping on with us today. It’s a beautiful day, a little cloudy outside. We’ve got our coffee and we are ready to talk pain.
Exciting if you haven’t been with us before. My name is Julie, and this is Mike and we’re with protocol sports systems. We are doing an online episode program, I guess you would call it about different types of chronic pain and all the high Shay and yay. We have somebody, she was my first one yesterday, too.
I love it. So, instead of just telling you about different techniques to do and different things like that, I really am a big believer in doing concept and theory. I love the idea of understanding the depths of why, and that really makes it important for me, part of what I do besides owning the business here, which we are a sports performance and therapy center.
Pain, Pain, Go Away
01:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We do comprehensive therapy, rehab, functional training, functional movement, the whole nine, but I also am an instructor and I do a lot of the science classes at IKOS, which is a health science college. I do the kinesiology and anatomy and pathology physiology amongst all these other classes.
I, it’s fun for me to get a chance to really talk with all of the people that make it part of our team. We get to come together and really see what you guys are all about and really teach you guys something so that you can actually help your own body. Today we’re talking about pain, chronic pain, and injury, and this, I love this.
I think you’re going to be really excited. Yeah. We live for pain. We live for it. We have titled this episode, pain go away because we know everybody and their mama wants to get in a go out of pain.
What Is Pain?
02:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We had so many people that are sitting in pain and so much chronic pain out there. We want to know what is pain? I think people have an understanding of pain as something physical that happens to them.
A lot of times people will have a, a pain from heartbreak or sadness, right? There’s so many different things out there and it’s, is it physical? Is it emotional? Is it personal pain? There’s a lot of pain out there.
02:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
And actually there,
02:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, that too, like really? What, what is it? Pain is actually defined as an unpleasant, sensory and emotional experience with acute, actual, and potential tissue damage.
That’s the study of pain that 2011 study from the international, for the study of pain. It really goes back to it’s more sensory oriented. Like there is actual things that are happening to our body as far as damage that goes on, but is how do we work with that physical damage? And how do we perceive it? That’s really the definition of pain, which I think I find so interesting.
Pain actually varies from person to person, right? Everybody has an individual experience of pain. If you talk about it, a lot of times you’ll ask somebody who’s had something and there were just like, this was the worst experience I’ve ever had. Like I hurt my, I broke my arm and it was awful.
03:47
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The other person was like, ,
Emotional And Psychological Pain
03:49
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
More important than that. I think a lot of people would be going through this right now is the experience of helping your child with their work from school. That pain runs deep. It scars. I’m sorry. Go on. What were you saying?
04:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
There’s a lot of emotional pain there too. Psychological pain. Yes. So, so what I want to do is we’re going to go back on, we’re going to define what is acute pain? What is subacute pain?
What is chronic pain? We’re going to go through all of the different theories that the reason why chronic pain came to be sorry. I have something on my face and how they actually figured out what pain, theory behind it and what we’re using now and how much it’s associated with the nervous system.
The brain is so much a big part of pain. What can we do about it? Because at the end, it doesn’t do us any good to not tell you how to get out of pain. If you don’t know what to go into Canada,
Pain Is Information
04:50
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
When it comes down to it, the brain processes, all the information, your, everything around you. And so what is pain? Pain is just information that’s entering your brain. The brain has spend processing, how does your brain process it? That’s where the tricky part comes in.
Otherwise all the sensors that you’re getting throughout, whatever you’re just heard in your body, that’s all just information going up to the brain it’s out to then processes what we’re going to try to dive into.
05:14
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Yeah. It’s the body is amazing. I just, I have such a huge love affair with the body. Every time I talk about it, I, I it’s so amazing guys how much our bodies are just incredible. And we have all of these. There is the nervous system. We’re going to go into this at a later date, we have a nervous system, right?
The brain and the spinal cord is the central nervous system. It goes down into the peripheral nervous system, which jumps into all of the body parts. The brain is telling the body parts what to do. The body parts are sending signals back up to the brain like, Hey, I want to move this.
Hey, there’s a spider crawling on my leg. I’d like to, I’d like to smack it off. Hey, I just I’d like to pick up my leg. The brain’s like, okay, pick up your leg.
Pain Signals
06:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And then it goes through the brain. The body is sending pain signals. It’s sending stimulation signals. It’s sending, I’m being overstretched signals. There are so many sensors that are going through.
Where we’re going to do is we’re going to break down theories of pain, where it started from. We’re going to talk to you through about this pain cycle and then how to actually get rid of your own pain cycle. Because I find that it’s amazing. Like when you guys really understand the pain part of it’s going to make life so much easier for so many people.
Yeah, I think empowerment, if you guys know, I’m all about really educating people and we’re all about empowering them to allow you guys to really understand your own body. When you understand your own body, then you can take this really educated look at what’s working and what isn’t.
A Theory Of Pain
07:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And it’s amazing. So let’s start here. Let’s start with a theory of pain. Like where did it all come from? Where does pain actually show up from? It, actually, the first theory of pain was in the 16th century.
It was this French philosopher and mathematician of all things Descartes. He proposed the first theory of pain. His spirit there pain theory was it’s the specificity theory of pain. That’s a tough one to say, sorry.
Basically what it is the amount of pain that is experienced is proportional to the amount of tissue damaged. Basically, if you take your hammer and you hit yourself in the thumb, you’re going to get the same amount of data of pain that you damaged your tissue with.
It doesn’t really, it didn’t really match up because what if you have like a paper cut? Like that’s not a lot of tissue damage, but that hurts like, hell I don’t know anybody else has had one, but those things hurt.
08:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What else it didn’t do is it proposed a lot of different things, but it was really basic. It was just like, if you, if I cut myself here, if I scratch her, cut myself and that’s where it’s going to hurt and that’s it. It didn’t really go into all of the emotional aspects of it.
The More You Hurt, The More It Hurts
They were so basic back in the sixties, they were, I mean, it’s like minimal damage equals major pain. They could not figure that one out. They kind of just jumped in back and forth. In 1965, like this is how long ago this, that was the way it was up until the 19 65. So it was amazing, right?
The 20th century is like, that’s when everything started to change. There was this guy named Melzack and he proposed the control theory of pain, which is what the majority of all of our therapy or manual therapy, physical therapy, all of the massage therapy.
09:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s what it’s all been based around for the longest time. That’s my stuff, didn’t start rolling up until like the seventies and eighties and nineties, like people weren’t really paying attention to it because they all thought like, whatever you hurt you’re hurt.
And, and the more you hurt, the more it hurts, the more damage you do, the more it hurts. That’s kind of where it was. In 1965, they figured out that there was this gate control theory of pain. What’s interesting in that is that they basically said that the non pain, so you have non pain stimuli and you have pain stimuli, right?
They’re saying that the non pain stimuli goes on the, there are shorter and faster nerves that go, they travel on, sorry, on the larger and the faster nerves. The pain stimuli travel on the slower and shorter nerves. Everything is rooted in your, your spinal cord, the roots of your spinal cord, right?
Shut Off The Gatekeeper Of Pain
10:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So they’re talking about it. Like there’s this gatekeeper of pain. If you can actually beat the nerve, the pain to the nerve root, via ice, via heat, massage, compression, menthol, like icy hot, then you beat you.
You can shut off the gatekeeper of pain. That’s where the whole ice and heat and all of the icy hot stuff. That’s where, yeah. That’s where it all came from. How cool is that? So, it kind of came through, like, we just have to beat that pain to the center, and then we’re good.
What was interesting is that it took into account some of the sensory stuff, but it didn’t take into account all of it. Right. It’s just basically like, let’s beat them there. Let’s, let’s hopefully that we’ll be able to ice it down and then nobody will be in pain anymore. We can start the healing process.
11:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Woo. In doing his studies, Mike Melzack was like, there’s gotta be something more. There’s gotta be something more to it because there were people that were still in pain. Even though they weren’t, they were doing all of this stuff that was happening.
The Neural Matrix Theory Of Pain
It wasn’t getting any better. They were still in pain and still in pain. Right. In 2001, he came back again and had the neural matrix theory of pain, which is alive and well today. This is where, I mean, and the talk is over.
The neural matrix theory of pain, this is really the coolest thing, because what they found is there’s actually emotions that go with pain and pain is one of several outputs produced by the brain. Like just one of many it’s like so multifaceted. What it does is it takes input for perception and emotional states past experiences.
Right. It could be triggered by the inflammation or pathology, but it can also occur on its own.
12:11
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It. Can you like, have you ever had that stuff where you’re like, I don’t even know how I did it. I just, I just ended up in pain. Like, I don’t know what happened. Like yeah. We hear that all the time.
Like, I, I got a call today from like, I don’t know what happened, but I’ve got this pain in my leg and I don’t know where it came from. We do, you do actually, and you’re going to know today, so how is this actually possible? Right. Pain people think that pain is something physical that happens.
Emotions And Pain
How does this all work? So here’s what happens. It actually divides itself into several parts. All input comes into all different areas. So you have this somatosensory. How, what the inside, like a somatic sense is, what’s actually what you’re feeling on the inside. Right? And so there’s this feeling of pain.
13:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
How does the pain feel? Is it burning? Is it tingling? Is it aching? What’s the intensity of pain. That’s still some out of sensory. It’s still your sensation of what it is. How many times have you hurt yourself?
What’s the frequency of that, you know? And what’s the duration. How long does it last? How many different places in the body? Like the distribution of pain. Thank you for the thumbs up. I love that. The motivational effective. No, it’s super cool. What’s your emotional state, right?
Like w how do you feel emotionally about the pain? That’s what people don’t understand is that your emotions are tied directly into your pain. Like 100%. That’s the super coolest part about this. Also your brain is constantly going back and forth to like this.
This happened to me before. All of your past experiences and how you handle the stress of that, that plays into it too.
Know How You Respond To Pain
14:07
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This is why it’s so cool to know. This is that your pain response is directly determined by how your body sensors, it’s the neuro matrix. Your body sensors interprets the pain.
14:23
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Absolutely. As you learn more about why it’s there, you can actually control, help control your pain and what, and why you’re experiencing that pain to help you get out of pain in the future, even in the pain you’re in presently. Yeah.
14:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So, so let’s talk about this. So let’s say something happens, right? Boom. It just, boom. Something happens. Your nerves respond to just what happened. Then you have voluntary and involuntary responses. You’re cussing, you’re yelling. You’ve got other coping strategies, right? Because you’re screaming, yelling.
Cursing And Pain Response
14:55
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, we noticed that I have you guys ever wanted to watch MythBusters. They did a whole study on cursing and pain response and how long you can hold out for pain or your pain threshold can go up by the words that you’re emoting.
As you went through the experience, they found that you can’t just say butterflies cupcakes that did not work. You had to go for the deep. When people dug deep, for those words, they had a lady on, I can’t remember her name, but when she spoke, she yelled out words.
The guys were going, whoa. Everyone thought of putting those words together yet she was able to withstand and women tend to have a higher pink dollars, not all the time they tend to do, but she would hurt her numbers just for her alone. They did a control. I’ve heard you say cupcakes and flowers.
15:37
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Using these curse words that she was using, she held out a lot longer. And it’s all because of the words. Yeah.
An Outlet For Pain
15:44
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s authentic versus inauthentic self is really true. Like, if you are really not feeling it’s not, it’s gonna, it’s going to take your pain and it’s going to drop it on the inside instead of being an outlet for it to go away.
So you’re holding onto it. If you’re not, if you’re not authentic with it. You not only are you swearing, you’re, you are, you’re cussing, you’re swearing, you’re yelling because all sorts of stuff is going on. You’ve got all these different coping strategies that you’re coming in with. You have your involuntary, which is your sympathetic nervous system is like, and your hormones go crazy.
You’re releasing adrenaline. You’re releasing cortisol. It’s involuntary. It’s what your body does. Your sympathetic nervous system is that involuntary part. It’s your heart rate going up? It’s your eyeballs dilating. It’s, it’s everything like getting ready for, for hurting yourself.
16:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The cool thing is that the neuro matrix all your body sensors, they can actually modulate their own input. They can adjust themselves. Now let’s put two and two together on how we change how we are feeling in that pain cycle based on how we adjust it?
Now we have this idea like, Hey, wait a minute. If I am, my reaction with pain is directly results in how the pain I’m having. So each person does this differently. And each person regulates their own response. It’s called your neuro signature, which I think is really cool.
It fully embraces a brain’s ability to change, remodel and reorganize itself, to recruit adaptability it’s neuroplasticity, which is a big talk in our world. These days, everybody talks about neuro-plasticity, but nobody ever understands what it is.
The more we’re learning about the brain and the body’s role together in pain, that we’re realizing how much power we to change our own and to fix ourselves because no therapist can fix you.
17:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We fix ourselves. It’s all really what we do in here. What does that mean for us.
18:03
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
As therapists,
Forming New Neural Pathways
18:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Like, as humans. Okay. It means that when we repeatedly practice a sequence or movement, any kind of activity, or are repeatedly exposed to new experiences, there’s always new neural pathways. Forming always, you’re constantly putting your brain on like work mode.
So you have to be it. That’s experiencing, that’s not disconnecting, like, try this, get let’s do a math problem. You get to do it. Not me. Eight times four. Okay. Okay. Plus three. Okay. Plus 11. Okay. Minus nine. Was that equal?
18:59
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Listen, the reason why I’m giving that is because if you guys had to do that at home, which I’m sure you guys all thought of the first time you had to do that, your is like going crazy.
Cause you’re literally following along with me going back and forth between like eight times four is 32 plus three is 35 plus 1136. Yeah. The math is not my thing. Good thing that I know the body anyway, the first time you’re doing it, your brain has to adapt to all that new stimuli.
Now if I do this again and I go eight times four plus three plus 11 minus nine equals 37, 8 times four plus three plus 11 minus nine equals.
19:39
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
37.
No New Stimuli Means No New Growth
19:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. So then there’s no new stimuli. If you have no new stimuli, then your body doesn’t, there’s no growth. Math is hard. This is hello, blonde. I swear I’m this is not my thing. Math is something that gets my eyes to glaze over.
19:54
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s also like this: it’s the first time you’re going to try something. You can be nervous to try it. Cause you’ve never done it before. You have a lot of fears going in, like, am I going to look stupid? Am I going to get hurt? Is this is dumb.
You can find all reasons to not do it because you’ve never done it before, but then you’ve done it that first time. You’re going to find if it was enjoyable, at least that first time you’re gonna want to do it again. You’re going to do it better. The second time you did it. The third and fourth, and you keep getting better and better.
20:17
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. Think about this though, Shea, is that this, how does this result in pain and pain cycle, right? If you keep doing the same thing over again, your body is disconnecting and it’s not getting any new stimuli. It’s going to go back to the same thing it felt before.
20:36
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Exactly.
With Pain, Your Body Doesn’t Know Any Better
20:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Exactly. That’s where chronic pain comes in because your body doesn’t know any better. It’s like creating new patterns. Right? We get into a disconnect where we’re automatically like do something and we’re like, oh, it’s going to feel like that.
Oh, it’s going to feel like that. We either get a fear for, instead of doing it, we don’t want to, because we have that fear of what could be, and, or we are, we’re go back into the old experience. We start changing how we’re doing things based on we’re so afraid to be in pain.
This directs directly relates to the pain cycle. That’s what this is called. This is why this is so important to know. If you can understand how our pain cycle works, then we can actually move ourselves out of potentially out of getting pain.
21:31
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah.
21:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So let’s break this down. Okay. Yes. Go, go Mike. Yeah. Mike is Mike be on the phone like you always are. Mike is walking down the street and he’s texting on his phone because he always does. And you know, you do too. Don’t play an ascent. You know, you do.
So listen your foot. Now he’s walking down the street and he’s foot lands on an uneven part of the sidewalk and he twisted his ankle. Right. All of a sudden now you’re, his brain is now barraged, like barraged with information about ankle movements, loss of balance. It begins the task of evaluating the situation like that’s its job.
The body is like, oh, the brain’s like, oh crap, this happened. And this is all happening really quickly. Your cognitive areas instantly survey your surroundings. They send a message comparing what just happened to what’s happened in previous events to see whether or not you’re in danger like that’s their job.
In the two seconds that you roll your ankle, your emotions then come into play…
22:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And this is all going on. Like at, in the moment, like in the two seconds that you roll your ankle, your emotions then come into play. That evokes like fear, anxiety of like, oh crap. I did this before and I know what it is or, oh my God, I don’t know. Am I going to be able to walk again? I’m going to have,
22:50
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Could this be in your own experiences or square as you were growing up, maybe somebody else has experienced that. They told you about how they’ll experience. You didn’t even have to experience it yourself, but you could have something that’s tied in from an early childhood.
23:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It could be, it really it’s your perception of it, right? So it’s not, it’s internalized. It doesn’t have to be actually happened to you prior necessarily. It’s something that your experience it’s trigger is what happened.
Once your emotions come into play, now you’re in like the hole. Your sympathetic nervous system jumps right back in. And it’s like, here we go. Fight or flight jumps in. Up goes your heart rate, your adrenaline, your breathing, your perspiration, you’re like, everything is just jumping in.
Now, if your brain decides that this event is like, non-threatening, then you just go keep walking. And you’d like text away. You’re like, oh my God, I just rolled my ankle. If your brain thinks that there was something that really bad happened to you in the past.
Like if you were do this before and you had a third, a third degree strain on your ankle, right.
24:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Or sprain, sorry. If you have a third degree ankle sprain before, then your brain may perceive this as a really bad accident and generate enough pain to get your attention so that you then have to call somebody for help.
24:15
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Maybe you actually did.
24:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Potentially.
24:18
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s swollen up.
24:19
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It could be, or it couldn’t be. You just, you have that pain sensation that comes back in. It’s your brain’s response to pain, which is so cool.
24:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s always the brain’s response to the stimulus going into it.
24:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. So, so now let’s look at the types of pain, right? So, so that’s what happens. What, so then that would be acute pain. We’ve heard all heard the people say like, oh my God, is it acute?
Pain: Acute Or Chronic?
Like you hurt yourself. You go to the doctor’s or you go, wherever you go. And they said, well, is it acute? Or is it like chronic? Or is it subacute? Like, what is it? It most, a lot of people are like, I don’t know what it is. It hurts. So I just did it. Right, exactly. Acute is I just did it. I just stepped in a pothole. I just had surgery. My throat is killing.
25:10
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Me.
25:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s a whole different type of pain. It’s usually less than 30 days. It’s your injuries, your diseases, your invasive procedures, like surgeries and stuff. Acute pain is usually it’s really predictable.
It’s usually accompanied by swelling, lack of improper movement or proper movement. Like you can’t move it sometimes as heat tissue. It’s all from tissue damage. Right? Excuse me. All right. As the tissue starts to heal, most of the time it starts to diminish. Like the swelling will start to go down. The heat will go down. The redness will go down.
Most of the time people will just resume their active life. If it doesn’t and it diminishes tool point, but then it doesn’t. You go into a subacute phase and subacute pain means that your inflammation, your heat, your redness have suicided, but yet you’re still left with pain. So there’s acute and there’s subacute.
26:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And then.
26:24
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What, three months later, Julie.
Chronic Pain Is Anything Over 3 Months
26:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Chronic pain shows up, right? It’s crazy. Chronic pain. You guys, chronic pain is anything over three months. If the persistent pain doesn’t go away in three months, it’s, that’s the dividing line between acute pain and chronic pain.
The here’s the kicker, acute pain is paying that as attractive or pretty in an endearing way. Yeah. I think it’s a different type of cure pain. There’s acute pain and acute pain is not pretty. It would definitely not make you attractive. It usually gives you the ugly cry face, like boom, chronic pain. It reflects the state of the client’s nervous system. Right?
Back again, your nervous system again, is reflected in your pain. This is really important now because so many people have anxiety based on this quarantine, that’s going on, that there are your people’s chronic pain are through the roof because they can’t disassociate one with the other.
27:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
People are getting into more pain, which is generating more pain, which generate anxiety, which is generating more pain and their nervous system is over loaded. Yes, totally. Totally. According to the national Institute of health in 20 15, 25 0.3 million adults experienced chronic pain, that’s.
28:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Lot. Yeah.
28:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And that was 2015.
28:04
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s chronic pain is sitting around for a long time.
28:07
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Chronic pain crazy. And that’s five years ago. I can only imagine that there’s a lot more going on right now, 25, more than 25%.
28:19
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I just want to get my clients right now is experiencing all this it’s gone way up,
Nearly 40 million adults are in severe pain
28:24
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Nearly 40 million adults are in severe pain, Like severe pain. That just means the chronic pain has risen to a point where they’re just, I can’t even deal. Chronic pain is like, I just, I feel that every damn day, every day, severe pain is where it’s debilitating. Fear pay you guys, 40 million people. How does acute pain progress into chronic pain?
28:56
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
That’s going to be all tied into the emotions tied into however you interpret that experience that you had when you received the pain initially.
29:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Sure. Yeah. Like depression plays a role, the pain intensity and the duration plays a role. Genetics play a role a lot of times because we tend to get picked things passed down, unfortunately, but it’s true. Your own belief system about how you deal with pain is it usually is the predictor of if it will become chronic or not,
29:24
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I don’t care if you think you have a high pain tolerance, you, it all depends on where you are at the moment and the type of pain it is and what you’re experiencing, because I’ve had people lay on the table and said, oh, I have high pants.
So I could take anything. You just lay your hand, gently on them. And they’re jumping off the table. Like pain tolerance off, they expected, they would have a high paint entre.
You used to be able to experience a lot. This is a different kind of pain that they’re experiencing at the moment.
And they’re not used to that. With that you touch them, you stimulus, they just go through the roof. So we get to bring it down. That tells me that their sympathetic system is just firing off. Right. Our job within D to bring it back down and get them into that parasympathetic,
30:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This we’re going to get him into the circle. So that brings up a good point. That’s like sensitization. If we’re over sensitized on something, it means our threshold is really low.
But, but what is a pain perception? Like what is your perception of pain? It’s like super subjective. It’s completely individual. It’s your own interpretation of an unpleasant experience. Like for me and you, I have a different interpretation than you do.
30:36
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Two people who experienced exactly the same thing at the same time, two vastly different.
30:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s and you guys know this, it happens all the time. Right? Where you’ll be with somebody and somebody would be like, that was the worst thing ever. And you were like,
30:48
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Oh, it was.
Pain Perception
30:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Awesome. It was all right. I mean, he’s, that’s that whole, like you’re being such a wuss. You have a hangnail stumping being a woosie. It’s your pain perception. You guys can’t keep so hardcore.
31:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
On them.
31:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I’m sorry. I have to. So, so listen. The factors that influence pain perception, it’s your gender, your race, your age, your ethnicity, your emotions. Again, obesity is a big role in their levels of physical activity or lack thereof, physical activity and sleep deprivation.
31:28
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
So.
31:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Big one, if you guys are so sleep deprived, you, everything is going to be, excuse me, everything is going to be like way over. You’re going to be over sensitized to a lot of stuff that you normally wouldn’t be.
31:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Wash your hands, get your sleep.
31:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Please drink a lot of water. So the pain threshold. So we have pain perception, right? Pain threshold that I yell at you.
Pain and Fight or Flight
31:52
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
No, I got scared by something that I was like, I’m like this I’m in fight or flight right now.
31:57
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I know. I get so ramped up talking about this stuff. Can you tell, I get excited. I get excited. I can’t help it. I can’t help it. So look, your pain threshold. Everybody’s got a pain perception, but they also have pain threshold and pain tolerance. What’s the difference between pain, threshold and pain tolerance.
32:17
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked that. What do you think it is? Okay.
32:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
See how we serve that one up pain threshold. It’s the minimum intensity of stimulus perceived as painful. It’s still your internal experience. It’s the S the, the lowest amount of stimulus that you as pain, right? It’s the lower end.
Pain Tolerance
The pain tolerance is your max level. So your threshold is down here. Your tolerance is up here. Again, it’s completely specific to each person, right? It’s the, it’s the specific stimulus of pain that somebody is willing to experience. Some people have a very high pain tolerance and some people, yeah.
And then they don’t for other things. And here’s, that’s the coolest part. You guys is. Sometimes if you are not emotionally attached to something, your pain threshold goes high. If you are emotionally attached to whatever it is, that’s going on, your body, your life, your children’s life, your job, your lifestyle, your pain tolerance goes down.
33:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You can’t, you just, you don’t tolerate it very well, because if you were attached to it, like, do you see how cool that is? So, I mean, I dunno, maybe I’m completely nerd, but I love this stuff. I mean, I’m a total nerd, but I love this stuff. We’re going to get into in a minute, how do we take care of this?
So now we know what it is. Right. We know the why, and now we get to talk about how to take it out. Right. And how to keep it out. And that is pain management. So, so you’ve got these things called your nociceptors, which are your pain sensors.
Right. There are the ones that are like, we’re in pain and they run up to the brain and they tell it, they send it a signal, and then your brain drops it back down.
34:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They’re just like, okay, we’re going to work on sensitization. They’re there every time there’s more, more brain power. Like.
34:26
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I know.
34:28
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Every time there’s more like sensory overloading your brain with a nociceptors you’re your, your threshold is reduced. So that’s what we’re saying. Like the more sensation you’re getting up here, the more, the less sensation you have downstairs, you hear your threshold drops.
And so you’ll get overloaded. That’s why a lot of times people are like, oh God, don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Because they’re attached its own emotional neural attachment to it. And it’s subconscious. It’s not something we know what we’re doing. It’s, it’s like a totally subconscious thing.
35:02
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s not that you want to be them.
Emotionally Attached To Chronic Pain
35:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Who wants to be like this? Although. There is a thing where we get attached to being chronic in chronic pain. There is a, there is that where we are emotionally attached to our chronic pain.
We don’t really want to let it go because we don’t know what we would do without it. We’re going to talk about that in a second, too. In 2018, the consortium pain task force did a study and they said that manual therapy, massage therapy and non-pharmacological approaches are the frontline in treating acute subacute and chronic low back pain.
They said that patients with chronic low back pain who underwent bio-psychosocial rehab programs, that’s pain education, along with therapy and reprogramming, basically working on somebody, educating them, giving them homework so that they understand it.
They experienced less pain, fewer disabilities and improved work status compared with patients who receive standard or usual care, right?
Empowering People Through Pain
36:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Like that is huge. What does that mean? That means you get to touch people. You get to work on people, you get to educate them and you get to empower them. The more we know about our bodies and what’s working or not working with our bodies, how patterns have changed, we’re able to get out of chronic pain. Like we can keep people out of chronic pain if they choose to want to be out of chronic pain.
36:38
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
There’s so many other reasons why someone is experiencing pain. We get to look at all of them. Cause if you miss one, it’s going to tend to come back and it’s going to come back. Sometimes, sometimes come back with a vengeance.
36:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing. So, so Y in the big game of things, right, I just, we just spent, like, I don’t even know how long this was 10 to 20 minutes, according to some of you, way too long, talking about pain, right. Pain and injury.
But why in the big picture? Listen, I don’t care if you go to us, I don’t care. If you go to another physical therapist, I don’t care who you’re going to, but if you don’t connect with your own body and become an active player in the game of rehab for yourself, it will not change your outcome.
That’s the big aha takeaway on this. Your brain is associating. Everything you’ve done in the past. If you’ve gone to somebody who has hurt you in the past, who has put you in pain in the past, who has worked too hard on you in the past, you immediately go into a trigger and then you don’t allow that next person to get out of the pain cycle.
37:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It starts all over again for you. However, if you are, if you directly say, look, I’m going to be accountable for my own therapy. I’m going to be accountable for my own wellness.
I’m going to jump in and I’m going to feel, what does it feel like when I’m actually moving my shoulder and retracting it based on the fact that I’m, instead of using my Peck in the front, I’m using the muscles in my back. It because after a while, we start to change how we’re moving.
If you are a somebody who is an active and proactive player in your own health, then you can actually change up your chronic pain and you can get out of it and keep it out. It really takes you being accountable for you.
I think a lot of times. You can tell me what you think. A lot of times, people really want to stay in pain because they really don’t want to connect with the parts that have kept them there because it’s so emotional.
When Pain Becomes An Identity
38:48
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Okay. Then becomes part of their identity. They’ve always had pain. That’s where they expect themselves to always be in pain. Sure. They can, and it’s sometimes hard to get through to an individual that they can change where they are.
Right. They can change the position they’re in just by beginning to understand where is all this pain coming from and be coming from a lot of different systems, all coming into one. We get to experience or get to them to get the knowledge of why that pain is there all the different reasons why the pain is there and address them all.
Yeah. Because if you don’t address them, then you’re just going to keep going through the same cycles over and over again.
39:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s what the whole theory is based on you guys, who said, it’s so much more than just physical. There’s so much mental and emotional attachment to it.
Your brain is constantly working for you. Your is, your body really does want you to feel better. It’s, it’s really trying to get you into that homeostasis and wants balance. It doesn’t like being out of balance, but it comes to a point where it doesn’t understand what balance is because we’ve worked it for so many years with doing other things.
If we can actually take a proactive role in our own health and allow us to release that emotion, that’s tied to whatever injury we have, be it personal, be it emotional, be it spiritual, be it physical.
We have to be able to release it and let it go. The minute we are able to do that, things change and they’ll change permanently.
40:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And that’s the beauty of we, what.
40:23
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Is it permanent? Or can they slip back into that?
40:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You can slip back.
40:27
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
In. It’s easy to fall, right back here.
Be Committed To Your Own Health
40:30
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. You have to be committed to your own health and you have to be doing it all the time,
40:34
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Knowing that you slipped back into that cycle and be able to, you can get yourself back out.
40:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is the biggest thing. I think that’s the biggest thing that for, I know for what we do and for the people that we see a very proactive client that really do want to get out of this pain there. They’ve had it. They’re tired.
They’re tired of being in pain. Pain is exhausting. They, yeah, they had seen a lot of people. They haven’t felt heard. They haven’t felt helped. They haven’t really felt empowered to do it on their own. I think a lot of times people have a tendency to, they give up their power to someone else because they want that person to fix them.
Really the biggest thing is you are the, you are the one that fixes you. Nobody else can do it. We’re the rest of the whole medical community, our facilitators, we can facilitate via all different types, manual therapy, massage therapy, physical therapy, regenerative therapy, doing surgery, it’s facilitating.
41:38
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
At the end of the day, you are in charge of you and you are in your own body.
41:43
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I mean, if you want to pay us to be with you all day long and correct you all day long, every single day, we can be open to that. Really you have the power to do it yourself and you get to, because we got other things to do really.
41:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s powerful. It’s really powerful. So I hope really you enjoy this. What we’re doing. I really want you to get the why behind all of the techniques that you see. I want you to get the why your body is so powerful, why your body is so amazing.
Wow. Why, why I’m, I’m a big wire. I enjoy the Y. I want you guys to take a proactive view on your body and your health, because when you can do this, it really does change everything.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to be out of pain for the rest of your life. It does mean like Mike said that you’re going to be able to,
42:38
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I don’t have the tools to correct. Most of the pain you’re in.
42:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah.
42:43
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You just got to learn. That’s what we are here to help you learn how to do that. People like us, there’s a lot of us Are there to help you learn. If you really want to learn, we can help you.
You have the tools. Occasionally we all need each other’s help every now and again. We’re there to help for the new things that come up. For the most part, once you’ve learned it, you can have your own tools to keep you out of pain permanently.
Please Comment!
43:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, 100%. So, Hey, I hope you guys have liked this. Please let me know. You can leave some comments. You can leave. You tell your friends we’re going to be doing this every Wednesday at 1230, we’re going to be doing a Facebook live based on different types of pain. We’re going to be doing fascia. We’re going.
43:26
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
To be,
43:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We’re going to, the thing we’re going to be doing next week is there are so many people sitting at home right now. I really want you guys to understand the difference between muscles that are long and weak and short and weak.
Because when muscles don’t have a chance to contract and get blood in them, they don’t do very well. Joints get to be pulled out. A lot of times what will happen is as we’re sitting at our desks, as we’re sitting like this, doing this, the muscles in our back are overstretched and they’re, they don’t have any kind of contractile function because we’re not actually using them.
The muscles in the front are over contracted. And so they’re too tight. The head, the head hits forward and the head is a heavy head to the average head weighs seven pounds. If you move every couple, every inch is seven pounds, seven pounds.
44:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You drop your head forward. It could become a 42 pound head, right? Or if or more, depending on how heavy your head is, some people have dense heads.
The other thing too is if I’m going to leave this, leave you guys with this thought, if all of your muscles are being underused and underutilized, and you have this big head, that’s sitting forward, either texting or doing the computer, the vertebrae, your neck and your upper back, the vertebrae now have to function where the muscles aren’t.
That’s where you’re going to get that whole like, hump that Dowager’s hump start, that overflow section of like the forward head, it’s actually your joints moving and adapting to the under use of your muscles.
Yeah. It’s like, it’s totally fixable, but I really want to go into how we can do this on our own, because I mean, who knows how long we’re going to be sitting in here.
45:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Next week at 1230, we’re going to be talking muscles and joints and compensatory patterning for like sitting forward head syndrome and pelvis syndrome. Okay. I hope you had a great time and we will see you real soon.