percent of people found that swigging six extra glasses of water a day
helped relieve chronic headache pain.Let’s say you touch a hot pan handle. The burn you feel on the tips of your
fingers triggers a message from your nerve endings that instantly instructs your
body to remove your hand before you scorch it black.
Without that signal, there’s no way for your body to protect you from
dangerous situations. This is why people with diabetes who have nerve damage
in their feet sometimes must have limbs amputated. They develop infections, but
they have no pain signals to tell them something is wrong. And if they can’t see
or feel the infection on the bottom of their feet, it spreads so badly and for so
long that the only method of treatment is to amputate.
So we have to appreciate that pain is nature’s way of alerting your brain to
something wrong in your body. Your body senses pain through two sets of nerve
endings—one that operates slowly and one that operates quickly. The fast ones
are surrounded by what’s called a myelin sheath, which is a fatty protective layer
that speeds the pain sensation’s transmission to your spinal cord and brain so you
can react quickly (dropping the hot pan, for example). The slower kind of nerve
endings don’t have that sheath, so what you feel is more of a deep pain rather
than a stabbing one. That’s often the way people describe chronic pain—the kind
that radiates through the body day after day.
Like every family, the Oz squad has experienced its share. Lisa has felt aches
in her lower back and my dad has dealt with lots of knee pain. From many years
of operating, I’ve had quite a bit of back trouble as well (standing with your head
bent over looking into a chest cavity isn’t exactly perfect posture).
It’s important for me to say that with any chronic pain issues, you should be
working with your doctor, because your goal shouldn’t be just to erase or mask
the pain, but also to find and treat the root cause. Even if there’s nothing serious
behind how your feel, pain will weaken other aspects of your health. When you
can’t sleep, you’re less healthy. When you’re bound to the couch or bed, you’re
less healthy. When you use brownie bites to counteract pain with a little
pleasure, you’re less healthy. Chronic pain continually influences your emotional
state, your work, your sleep, your play, your relationships, everything.