Your brain may be producing your pain (symptoms)
Your brain is the most powerful and complex organ in the body. Yet it is the one area we don’t even scan or is talked about when people go to a doctor for many medical issues (outside of hitting your head or having a stroke for example). Our medical system is great about ruling out serious physical issues and treating acute or traumatic physical injuries. The same medical system is not good about treating chronic or ongoing physical symptoms and certainly not good about including the brain in their assessment of physical symptoms.
What does your brain do and how can it be implicated in many health issues? The simple answer is the brain is connected to the body through the nerves that run to every tissue and every organ that’s in you. It continuously picks up information in your environment through our senses (taste, touch, smell, sound, etc), and in your body via what’s called interoception. The brain then makes split second decisions and interpretations off the information it receives. It makes its determinations based not just on the information it receives, but more importantly it determines how to react from your beliefs and prior learning and prior life experiences.
The brain is always sensing for danger and threat, thats a survival mechanism. If something threatening or dangerous happened before in your life, you can be sure the brain remembers that. It will then react off that experience or memory now if it reminds the brain of what happened before or it reacts from a belief the brain has about something. So you can see how the brain can easily react to so many things.
What we need to understand is the brain reacts to input from your environment and your body. Remember, it’s a two way street from the body to the brain and then the brain back to the body. It is the brain that decides based on everything it knows and has learned if there is something dangerous or threatening happening. What we see with chronic pain and many other chronic health symptoms is that issue is not in the tissues (the body). The issue instead originates from a brain that perceives some type of danger or threat happening from your environment or your body.
The brain can be overly sensitive or overly reactive, especially if you are stressed now or have been through a lot of stress from the past. This means the brain could be amplifying normal (harmless) input coming in from the body or your environment. This creates an over-reaction in the body from the brain. This is called central sensitization. I see this all the time and it is one of the major ways the brain is involved in creating and sustaining ongoing physical symptoms.
I could on and on here but I just want to make a point today on how important (but also totally neglected) the brain is when it comes to chronic physical symptoms that should have healed by now. Or symptoms that started in you without a physical cause but are being blamed on physical causes. We need to understand and look at the brain as possibly being the reason you have physical symptoms in your body. When this is the case (which is what I mostly see in the people I work with), then we need to target the brain instead of the body to feel better.
