Back in August, I wrote about a seminar I took about the neurology of pain. On Dec. 7-10, I took the follow-up version to that, called “Z-Health R-Phase” which talks about pain much more extensively. What excites me about this information is that it answers a lot of questions, like:

  • Why can 2 people have objective evidence of structural damage (like an x-ray of arthritis, a torn meniscus, hernia, etc.), and yet, one of them feels pain, and the other doesn’t?

  • Why can a person have everything working just fine (no structural damage), and yet, there’s still pain?

  • How can you get low-tech, but high-accuracy insights into the nervous system?

  • How pain can be improved or removed in seconds (even long-standing pain) with some unconventional drills for unrelated areas of the body?

That’s what we’ll talk about in this article. And hey, if you want to skip all the theory, and just jump right in, as to how we can decrease your pain, fill out this questionnaire to see if you qualify to work with us. Or, if you’re a personal trainer/physiotherapist/massage therapist/chiropractor reading this, and you’d like to take this (or other courses by Z-Health), email me, and I can get you a discount.

Pain is All in Your Head

All pain is 100% in a person’s head. That’s not to say they are lying about their sensations. They probably really do feel pain, but 100% of pain is generated in the head. Now, I can hear you thinking “Igor, the X-ray showed that I have arthritis in my knees. So it’s not in my head. It’s in my knees.” And I don’t debate the fact that indeed there may be some structural damage. However, the facts are that:

So what do we make of all this information? Is it just a coincidence when there is both pain and objective structural changes? Yep. Because, as the evidence shows, objective structural changes are no indicator of pain.

So then what is it that makes some people feel pain, whereas others don’t, even when the damage is identical?

That’s where the concept of the “threat bucket” was introduced by the founder of Z-Health, Dr. Eric Cobb.

The threat bucket contains anything that is threatening to your survival, evolutionarily speaking. So what would have been threatening to your survival 40,000 years ago? Things like poor vision, poor balance, poor senses of taste, smell, hearing, touch, and a bunch of others.

So into the threat bucket go the inputs. Inputs are all those factors that are potentially threatening to your survival.

And for the most part, those inputs aren’t a big deal, until they reach a certain threshold. Once they reach that threshold, your brain manufactures the delightful sensation of pain. Which is a big paradigm shift in and of itself – pain is an output, not an input.

The brain gathers inputs from both the environment, and from within your own body. And the brain decides what to do with those inputs. If it perceives them to be no big deal, there’s no pain. If it perceives them to be a big deal, there’s pain. And the pain may be in areas that have objective damage, or that have no objective damage.

So really, pain is not about actual, structural damage. Pain is about your brain’s interpretation of the inputs provided by the periphery, and your environment. And the output (the pain) is basically a signal. A signal telling you either do something different than what you’re doing now, or stop doing something that you’re doing now.

The Inputs

So we know that the brain gathers inputs from the periphery, and it can be any one of a bunch that could be causing the pain. What are those inputs? They are divided into 3 different categories:

  • Exteroceptive: the 5 senses, plus balance

  • Interoceptive: the functioning of your internal organs

  • Proprioceptive: your body’s sense about its position in space, as well as perceptions of things like blood pressure, body temperature, etc.

And each of these 3 categories is then further sub-divided into 5-6 categories. So it’s interesting that decreasing seemingly unrelated inputs (like improving vision, or improving hearing, or improving your sense of touch) actually might decrease your lower back pain, or knee pain, or headaches, etc.

Insights Into the Nervous System

So without using complicated laboratory devices, what tools do we use to get insights into the nervous system? There were 2 that were taught in R-phase (it’s a 10-course curriculum, and R-phase is just the first of the 10. There are other tools in other phases):

  • Gait (walking)

  • Eye movements

Based on the way someone walks, you can understand what the different parts of the brain are doing, and likewise for eye movements. There are different tests for the eyes (that go far beyond just whether someone has 20/20 vision) that can give insights into what’s happening with the nervous system, which puts us practitioners on the right path towards figuring out what inputs the nervous system perceives to be threatening.

It also gives us a handy reassessment tool. In other words, let’s say we see small things about the way a person walks that indicate suboptimal function of the nervous system. We would then implement a certain drill for 30-90 seconds, and repeat the walk, or the eye movement. If there’s improvement, we know we hit the right stimulus, and we should keep repeating it, until it’s more or less permanent. If we see no change, or it got worse, we know we’re barking up the wrong tree, and we should keep investigating what’s going on.

How Pain Can be Decreased or Removed in Seconds

So again, as you learned earlier, objective evidence of damage is no cause for pain. It’s the brain’s interpretation of peripheral inputs that perceives a threat, and results in pain. So we won’t improve objective damage in a matter of seconds, but we can improve vision, hearing, balance, joint mobility in a matter of seconds, and the pain either decreases, or goes away entirely (although it’s rare for it to go away entirely, but it does happen).

Now, of course the question comes up: once it goes away, does it go away for good, or does it come back?

After a single drill of 30-90 seconds, it would be naive to think that it would go away entirely, for good, and never come back. If you found a drill that works, and you want the pain to go away entirely, you have to keep repeating that drill 6-8 times per day, every day, for a few weeks. But don’t let that stop you. Think about it: 90 seconds, 8 times per day is only 12 minutes per day. So it’s not asking a lot.

Again, there are different inputs, and with R-phase, we learned how to address 2 of those inputs. As I take more courses in Z-Health, I’ll be able to assess, and address more of the causes for pain.

But if you have some pain, or limitations in range of motion that traditional methods have failed to address, maybe they failed to take the nervous system into account. I may be able to help with that. Fill out this form to see if you qualify to work with us. Or, as I mentioned earlier, if you’re a personal trainer/physiotherapist/massage therapist/chiropractor reading this, and you’d like to take this (or other courses by Z-Health), email me, and I can get you a discount.