Why Does My Pain Keep Moving Around?

If your pain has been confusing you by moving around to different parts of your body

then I can understand your frustration. Some days it may be on the left, then the next day on the right. Sometimes it’s in the shoulder blade and sometimes it’s neck pain. Maybe that ankle pain is starting to spread up to the knee as well. These are all common patterns that confuse people and make them wonder how many problems they actually have. If you are not making progress it may because you are chasing pain around the body instead of focusing on the key problem. Typically it is much more likely that you have one problem spreading around and causing secondary issues.

Centralization

In the case of the shoulder blade and neck pain it could be a nerve coming from the neck. Neck pain can be shooting down an arm or back pain down the leg due to a nerve in the spine peripheralizing in which case we need to do exercises that cause centralization of your pain.

Joint by Joint

In the example of the knee and ankle pain it can be from poor ankle mobility causing the knee to become unstable. Pain can also be coming from a neighboring joint that is dysfunctional which over time can affect other nearby joints as described in the joint by joint concept.

How we manage this

The way we approach this in the office is to look at the full picture of how you are moving with one-on-one care. We never address problems in isolation and during an evaluation we will look at the neighboring joints as well. If you have a shoulder complaint then we are going to take a look at the neck and the elbow as well. If we find problems there then we are going to continue down the chain to find the biggest priority for treatment. Once we have a list of problems we will start dealing with them one by one. Typically we will start most central to the spine, hips or shoulder and then work the way out. Ruling out problems one by one makes it so we are not missing anything and approaching treatment in a methodical and systematic way. So if you have pain in the shoulder we will rule out any neck pain before fully treating the shoulder. 

How to approach this

Having several different problems is still possible but it is also possible that there is one root cause for all these issues. At Full Stride our Sports Chiropractic approach is to try and narrow all of your issues down to one specific goal and then start to address it. Once we fix problem number one then we can re evaluate. Odds are pretty good that your problems have one underlying cause. We want to see if that is true and then start to address it. If there is still a lingering issue then that may be something separate that needs to be looked at. Without fully understanding where each of your pains is coming from we are never going to be able to decrease your symptoms and get you moving better. If you have been having a hard time returning to run then this may be a helpful new way to approach your rehab-focused program. 

If this describes you reach out to schedule an consultation