Interpret Your Symptoms Like A Pain Expert

For most of human healthcare, we assumed that our symptoms were the problem.

We have moved past that now to a large extent. For example: we know that the virus is the problem, not the green snot. Mucus is just a byproduct of essential immune function.

Prior to the microscope, we naturally assumed the redness and swelling of an infection was ‘the problem’. But since microscopes, we know our swelling is the body’s vital inflammatory response and the actual problem was an invasion of hostile microbes. Through this deepening of scientific understanding, we’ve moved past ‘symptom blaming’. Somewhat. Because we still very much do it with pain.

Many modern non-infectious health conditions are hard to quantify in the way we have been able to quantify infectious diseases. There is no ‘blood test’ or scan for migraines, fibromyalgia, neck pain, epilepsy, dementia, asthma, lower back pain, IBS, eczema, and virtually all chronic pains.

Faced with all this uncertainty, Western medicine tends to revert to ‘symptom blaming’ in order to diagnose and account for these modern disorders. Asthma is an excellent example of this. And understanding the truth about asthma offers a window into a better understanding of pain as a symptom.

Asthma is ‘constriction of the airways in the bronchi’. The constriction is caused by smooth muscle spasms. A smooth muscle spasm is a symptom. So when the family doctor says asthma is the diagnosis, they might as well be diagnosing their patient with ‘sneeze’.

If you search ‘asthma causes’ in the Google sphere, you’ll note that 99% of what you read is about triggers. Because the awkward truth is that asthma’s real causes are scarcely known to medical science. Sometimes it’s possible to blame smoking, yet most smokers don’t have asthma.

So as it stands, asthma is a set of symptoms.

The average family doctor may or may not truly believe asthma is a real diagnosis. But respiratory medicine professors don’t, I can assure you. They think of asthma as a largely mysterious cluster of symptoms.

The Asthma Predictive Index (API) offers a few tiny clues to asthma’s true causes. According to the index, having a parent with asthma, other allergies, eczema and elevated white blood cell counts are all predictors of asthma. This loosely points to genetics and immune system dysfunction.

Another clue to what asthma might actually be can be found in the pages of the ‘Journal Of The European Respiratory Society’. They published a literature review in 2015 that concluded the following…

‘Chronic stress in early life is associated with an increased risk of asthma onset’.

They also stated that…

‘Evidence suggests that chronic stress exposure and maternal distress in pregnancy operate synergistically with known triggers such as traffic-related air pollution to increase asthma risk.

Migraine headaches are also a symptom. One that medicine struggles greatly to come to scientific terms with. Deep down, most of us know that there must be an underlying cause of migraine. And that the headache itself is a symptom. But we settle for the migraine as an actual diagnosis when it’s not.

Like asthma, migraine is a set of symptoms that western medicine struggles to come to terms with. So it reverts to offering up the word ‘migraine’ as a diagnosis. Changes in blood flow to the brain are cited. Yet those changes are a symptom, just like the pain is a symptom. We have increased blood flow to injuries, but it doesn’t explain how the injury happened.

To be legitimate, a diagnosis must express some grasp of what causes a disorder.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definitions of a diagnosis and to diagnose:

Diagnosis…

‘the act of discovering or identifying the exact cause of an illness or a problem.

Diagnosis…

‘the act of discovering or identifying the exact cause of an illness or a problem.

An excellent example of a legitimate diagnosis is malaria. The malaria diagnosis stands up to scrutiny because we know exactly what causes it. The entire life cycle of Plasmodium parasites is observable, measurable and is verifiably the cause of malaria symptoms. Migraine is not like that at all; migraine is a set of symptoms. So is back pain. So are neck and shoulder pain. So are foot and hand pain. Pain is a symptom.

Substituting diagnosis for ‘symptom blame’ is an easy thing to gain patient agreement on. Symptoms are often very unpleasant. They can also be problematic in the extreme, especially when they get out of hand, as asthma can. But symptoms are never the diagnosis.

When we cough, we say, ‘I have a cough’, even though we know the cough is the body’s defence mechanism. It can easily feel like the cough itself is the problem, even though we know it isn’t. It’s very easy to give in to this type of sloppy interpretation of our chronic pain.

In fairness to all of us, it’s not so easy to always be totally logical and rational about symptoms. And symptoms do require management. During bouts of acute back pain, for example, no one wants to talk about core exercises, including me. That’s time to work on symptom relief.

There is a time and place for focusing on symptoms. There is a time and place for focusing on underlying causes and real diagnosis. But if we don’t embrace both, it can be hard to achieve the type of healing most chronic pain sufferers wish for in the long term.

To move past ‘symptom blaming’ and mere ‘symptom relief’ and truly resolve the underlying causes of chronic pain. We all need to develop strong discernment around what symptoms are and what actual disorders are.

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Interpret Your Symptoms Like A Pain Expert