Chronic pain has been said to be the most costly health problem in America. Estimated annual costs, including direct and indirect costs are close to $50 billion.
Low back pain
Seventy to 85 percent of adults in the US have back pain at some time in their lives. Five million Americans are partially disabled by back problems, and another 2 million are so severely disabled they cannot work. Low back pain accounts for 93 million workdays lost every year and costs over $5 billion in health care.
Cancer pain
The majority of patients in intermediate or advanced stages of cancer suffer moderate to severe pain. More than 1,000,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in the US, and nearly 550,000 people die from the disease.
Arthritis pain
Arthritis pain affects 40 million Americans and costs over $4 billion in lost income, productivity, and health care.
Headache
As many as 45 million Americans suffer chronic, recurrent headaches and spend $4 billion a year on medications. Migraine sufferers lose more than 157 million workdays because of headache pain.
Other pain disorders such as neuralgias and neuropathies that affect nerves throughout the body, pain due to damage to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), as well as pain where no physical cause can be found increase the total number of reported pain cases. Source: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
What is pain?
Pain is an unpleasant feeling that lets you know that something may be wrong. It is one of the body’s warning signals that indicate a problem that needs attention. Pain starts in receptor nerve cells located beneath the skin and in organs throughout the body. When there is an illness, injury, or other type of problem, these receptor cells send messages along nerve pathways to the spinal cord, which then carries the message to the brain.
The body
If we learn to listen to and understand our body, we will soon find out that a lot of our aches and pains might be coming from organs and not muscles. If we look at our pain signals (muscles, joints and ligaments), we can start to see that these might be the “branch” to our pain tree … but where is the “root” of it all coming from?
According to Francis Marian Pottenger in Symptoms of Visceral Disease, “the efferent (motor) neurons which supply somatic (muscle) structures have their cell bodies within the central nervous system (CNS). Those which supply visceral (organs) structures have their cell bodies either in the ganglia outside the CNS or in the walls of the structures which they supply. the visceral nervous system is a system of efferents (motor) only. It borrows its sensory or afferent neurons from the somatic (muscle) system.”
In short, this means that your organs share its sensory innervations with muscles! So when you have pain or dysfunction in an organ (root), muscles (branch) are our bodies way of telling us that there is something wrong. Your body and YOU cannot differentiate organ pain from muscle pain.
Examples
1. Stomach: innervated from T5–T9 and reflexes to the L epigastric region and mid scapula regions
2. Appendix: innervated from T10–L1 and reflexes to the lower R quadrant of the abdomen
3. Liver and Gallbladder: innervated from T5–T9 and reflexes to the R shoulder, R epigastric region and R scapular region
4. Diaphragm: innervated from C3–C5 and reflexes to both shoulders and the neck
5. Lungs: innervated from C3–C5 and reflexes to the shoulders, neck and mid back region
6. Heart: innervated from T1–T4 and reflexes to the L chest region and down the inside of the L arm
7. Colon: innervated from T9–L3 and reflexes to the lower abdominal area
These are just to name a few of your organs, what nerves supply them and where they refer pain signals to. So the next time you have pain, joint dysfunctions, and weakness or atrophy (loss of muscle), start to think of you muscular pain as the “branch” and the organ signals as the “root” of your dysfunction.
