Inflammation causes & pain… – Dr Jim Bob Haggerton

The last post on pain talked through some of the statistics of pain in the U.S. and problems with the current system. But let’s cover a little bit of physiologically how pain happens in the body so that we can talk about how to help it in our next post.

There are different types of pain and different nerve pathways that go to each of these:

Sharp Pain
Burning Pain
Pressure pain
Circulation Pain
Chronic Pain

Each of these are controlled by different nerve pathways.

But really there are only a couple reasons why you are going to have pain at all: Injury or Inflammation overload.

Injury is pretty self-explanatory. You damage the tissue somehow it can cause pain and can take a long time to heal.

Inflammation is a little bit different and can cause so many issues that have nothing to do with an injury at all. Even if you are working on healing from an injury, the inflammation levels in your body determine a lot of how much or little your pain is and how long it takes you to heal.

The main reason you build up inflammation in the body is from either chronic stress or gut issues. The gut is the major gateway to the body and when we don’t deal with our stress or we continually eat junk we can cause a breakdown in the lining of the gut and create “Leaky Gut”.

At this point you have lots of issues going on but the main one being that the body has to deal with chunks of food and proteins that are getting into the bloodstream that are not properly broken down and this creates tons of inflammation. The immune system will react to these food particles and acts as if they are literal foreign invaders getting into your system

So it will mount a defense against them and this leads to more and more inflammation.

Even if you’re not creating tons of damage like this but you are not eating a healthy, balanced diet you can build up an imbalance in your system of healthy fats and B-vitamins and once again you’re going to find yourself in inflammation alley.

Simply put: The more inflammation you have, the more pain you have…period.

In the next post I write we’ll talk about some practical ways to fight inflammation in the body.

Stay tuned.

Be well!

Dr. JB