What Causes Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain refers to pain that lasts more than three months. The pain can be constant or recurring, and may occur in one or more body areas. For some, the pain can be debilitating; for others, the worst part is its persistence, e.g. “I just can’t get free of it.”

The feeling that you are always in pain can dramatically decrease the quality of your life. These feelings may be exacerbated by the failure of traditional medicine to offer permanent pain resolution to chronic pain sufferers. Physicians may tell patients “there is nothing more I can do for you,” or even “it’s all in your head.”

Many medical professionals rely heavily on x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs to find areas of pain and dysfuntion. But when there is no medical cause (a disease) and nothing shows up on these diagnostic tests, the pain is often "mechanical, " -due to adhesions. The smallest adhesion can pull on pain-sensitive structures within the body with great strength, and create pain, which is called "unexplained" because its cause is impossible to visualize using traditional medical diagnostic tests.

The chronic pain patient is a perfect match for our services; we specialize in treating men and women who have been unable to find relief elsewhere. We began our focus on chronic pain 20 years ago, when we were searching for a way to relieve Belinda’s chronic pain after radiation therapy. Her physicians told her there was nothing else they could do for her pain. Belinda refused to give up and we began searching for a way to decrease her pain.

The Genesis of Chronic Pain

Unless chronic pain stems from a disease, it is generally termed “mechanical” or “unexplained.” In either event, we find that the cause usually stems from adhesions that the body created after an earlier surgery, inflammation, or trauma.

Adhered tissues cause pain and dysfunction as the adhesions pull on structures that should normally be free to glide over each other. We are skilled in using our hands to palpate sites where adhesions are gluing structures together, causing pain and/or dysfunction. We use our site-specific manual therapy to address these adhesions, strand by strand.

Often, the patient has a sense of the origin of the chronic pain. This is because the patient has felt the pain from the beginning, knows the events that transpired before the pain began, and knows whether the pain has changed in any way over the years.

The primary goal of our manual therapy (Wurn Technique®) is to increase mobility and decrease pain. We are skilled in using our hands to palpate tightened areas of the body until the tensions release. This appears to reduce adhesions, decrease pain, and improve soft tissue mobility. For more detailed information on how treatment works and how it feels, see “theoretical framework” and “what treatment is like.”

You may also find more specific information at:

• Abdominal and Pelvic Complaints
• Adhesions
• Back pain
• Headaches
• TMJ and Tinnitus
• Post Radiation Treatment
• Fibromyalgia
• Myofascial Pain Syndrome