Cutting Off Pain at the Source.
If you follow the latest in the health and wellness industry, you’ll hear a lot these days about identifying and correcting the “source” of pain. That will mean something different to various practitioners, depending on their background. For nutritionists it might mean, “you are what you eat.” Their philosophy is that health is built from the inside out, starting with the very building blocks of your physical body. To a chiropractor it might mean skeletal alignment. To a yogi, it could be something more metaphysical, like mainting spiritual alignment. None of them are wrong.
However, if we want to be literal, there really is an actual physiologic source of pain: it is what we refer to as a “pain receptor.” Logical, right? These receptors are tasked with sensing “damage” to the body. If they are stimulated enough, their signal reaches the brain, and the brain responds by telling you, “Ouch!” The key here is that when functioning normally, there is a threshold. Again, they have to be not just stimulated, but stimulated to an extent that the signal reaches the brain. For example: these receptors cover your entire body. If you lightly touch a spot on your arm, you wouldn’t expect that to cause pain because even though you are stimulating the pain receptors, the stimulation isn’t enough for the signal to reach the brain. Now poke yourself with a needle. (Ok, don’t really.) That is a lot more stimulation. Enough to reach the brain, and for the brain to respond by telling you, “Hey, that hurts!”
So what happens when you have dysfunctional pain receptors? They become hyperactive, sending far too much signal to the brain than they should. In a case like that, maybe you do simply touch yourself on the arm and get a pain response in return. Does that make you a wimp? No. Now, you might be a wimp anyway, but not because of that. In this case, your dysfunctional pain receptors are sending bad information to the brain, and the brain can only respond to what it’s being told.
One aspect of P-DTR® that makes it so powerful is its ability to specifically target not just muscular dysfunction, but dysfunction in specific types of receptors, including those that send information up the pain pathways to the brain. Today’s case was a woman suffering from pain in the anterior hip. She could not take a full-length stride and felt pain with every step. A few quick tests revealed dysfunctional pain receptors in the front and side of the hip. By loading these dysfunctions into the brain simultaneously and then triggering a deep tendon reflex (think about the leg jerk response when the doctor taps you below the kneecap), we essentially hit the “reboot” button on those receptors.
After clearing just one dysfunctional pair of pain receptors, she was able to take a full length stride and felt very little pain. After clearing a second set of receptors, her pain was completely gone.
Now that is truly addressing pain at its source.