…How chiropractic really works.

Your Brain and Chronic Pain: A Changing Map

Chronic pain isn't just about an injury; your brain plays a huge part in how you feel it and how long it sticks around. Think of your brain as constantly learning and changing, like a flexible map. This ability to change is called neuroplasticity.

Your brain keeps an internal "map" of your body. When you move, your muscles send signals to your brain about how long they are. Your brain stitches all this information together to create a picture of your body in space. Here's the cool part: this brain map is always updating! When you move your body differently, your brain changes to match.

Your Brain Map Can Grow or Shrink

The parts of your brain that receive information from your muscles can actually expand or shrink depending on how much and how often they get signals.

Want an amazing example? The Finger Webbing Experiment

Scientists did a fascinating study where they temporarily webbed together four fingers on one hand of a group of people, making them move like a mitten instead of individually. This changed the messages their brains were getting.

Within just 30 minutes, the part of their brain that handled sensory information from those fingers started to shrink! Since the fingers weren't moving independently and sending lots of separate signals, the brain decided it didn't need as much space for that input, so it "downsized" that part of the map. (Stavrinou et al., 2007)

How Does This Apply to You?

Just like the brain map can shrink, it can also grow and dedicate more space to receiving information. For example, if you start a new sport or learn to play an instrument, your brain will update its internal body map to learn all those new movements. The more you practice, the better your brain gets at understanding those movements, improving your coordination.

Chronic Pain and Your Brain Map

So, how does this relate to pain that sticks around? Even long after an injury has healed, your brain map can expand to receive more frequent pain signals. On top of that, if you're inactive because of pain, the movement-sensing parts of your brain map can shrink, leaving even more space for pain signals to take over.

Blurry Brain Maps and Protection

Now, let's think about what might have led to an injury in the first place, or why pain becomes chronic. We often live lives where we don't move our bodies as much as we used to.

When we don't move, the "connections" in our brain map (called synapses) don't get the exercise they need. This can make our body maps contract, become disorganized, and get "blurry". (Schabrun et al., 2017)

When your brain map gets blurry, it means you might lose some fine motor control, and your body's tissues can become less conditioned. This can trigger your body's protection system. (Moseley, 2011)

Pain is your body's protection system! Just like pulling your hand away from a hot stove, pain tells you to protect yourself. The newer understanding is that these blurry brain maps can make you more prone to injury and really drive chronic pain, alongside the expanding and contracting of the map itself. (Moseley & Butler, 2015)

The Stiffening Cycle

When our brain maps are blurry, it often leads to a stiff way of moving. (Meisingset et al., 2015) If you're constantly stiff, it puts extra stress on your joints, discs, tendons, and ligaments. Your muscles can get tired and painful from being overused. And if you sit all day, the same parts of your body are constantly stressed because of the lack of movement.

So, when we don't move much, our brain's understanding of our body can become fuzzy. This can trigger a "protection mode" because your brain perceives a threat of injury. Now you're stiff, your body is tired from trying to protect itself, and your brain is actually changing to receive more pain signals and fewer movement signals.

The good news

The good news is that you have found an amazing chiropractor who provides gentle neurologically based adjustments designed to improve your brain function and build more accurate brain maps so you can get back to your life.