(Video) Find the Root Cause of Your Pain

Break free from the Hope and Despair Cycle. Pain Mapping™ can lead to true healing.

Finding the root cause of pain can be a very challenging process for doctors, and even more frustrating for patients. If you have experienced prolonged pain from an injury or from aging, you know how frustrating it can be. No one wants to suffer from chronic pain. Pain makes life more challenging and gets in the way of you living your best life.

Maybe you’ve been struggling with pain for years and have tried just about everything to find relief. Or maybe you recently sustained an injury and are suddenly in agony, concerned you will never fully recover. Whatever your situation, no matter how big or small, there is hope! You can find lasting relief from your pain. It starts by finding and accurately treating the source of your pain.

Wellward’s Philosophy on Pain

Wellward has always been passionate about finding and treating the source of pain. One of our earliest taglines was “seeking the source of your pain.” The reasoning behind this is twofold: first, it explains very well what we do every day at Wellward. Second, the healthcare system and our culture assigns unhelpful, sometimes vague labels for pain.

For instance, terms like degenerative disc disease, or osteoarthritis, or sprained ankles are commonly used as labels for problems that are causing pain. The issue is, these are very vague terms and they don’t really tell us exactly what’s going on in the body. This is the equivalent of saying somebody has cancer, but then not going into detail as to the kind of cancer or what treatment options should be pursued. Therefore, diagnosing pain requires a trained expert to fully examine the affected area using the right tools.

Healthcare’s Shortcomings

Oftentimes, healthcare professionals don’t go far enough in their pursuit to understand the origins of a patient’s pain. This prevents them from getting a pinpoint diagnosis on the specific group of tissues, bone, and nerves that are causing pain. Without an accurate diagnosis, patients tend to go through what we call the Hope and Despair Cycle.

This cycle occurs when a patient seeks medical care for an injury and is provided with a treatment option that doesn’t work. After several cycles of this, the patient will become frustrated and eventually give up altogether on finding a treatment that will work. Instead, they turn to pain medicine, or potentially addictive opioids, which attempt to mask their symptoms.

Our Bodies are Incredibly Complex

Despite this reality, healthcare professionals really do want to help. However, our bodies are incredibly complex, which makes finding the actual source or cause of pain very challenging. The wrist alone is made up of 8 bones, 6 tendons, 4 ligaments, and a host of different muscle fibers and nerves. When someone has wrist pain, it can be any single or combination of these parts that are damaged or weakened. Finding an accurate solution to cure the pain is impossible without knowing exactly which structures are causing the problem.

A Unique Approach

One of the first steps to accurately diagnose pain is to get an MRI or X-ray. However, these imaging tools don’t look at the entire complexity of the joint or area. Further, MRIs and X-rays only take static images and therefore can’t observe the body under movement. This is a critical element in seeing how the anatomical structures are moving and working together.

The Wellward team does study our patients’ X-rays and MRI results, but our diagnosis doesn’t stop there. Our clinicians take it a step further and use live Ultrasound and live X-rays to get an even deeper look. Using live ultrasound, we can observe all of the tissue and structures at once. We can then run diagnostic tests of the body in different positions, movements, and under different stresses to see what specifically is happening beneath the surface.

Ultrasound can also be used to accurately administer injections to briefly numb small areas as a process of elimination. Meaning, we can use ultrasound to target and numb one structure to see what, if any, effect it has on the patient’s overall pain. If we numb one area and it doesn’t have much impact on the pain, it may not be playing a role and we know we need to keep searching. If we numb another structure and the patient feels relief, we know we are getting close to the source. This is one part of our Pain Mapping process, which is a proprietary process developed at Wellward to progressively identify and track down the specific cause of pain.

There’s Still Hope

If you are suffering from pain, don’t give up hope! While it may not feel like it, our bodies always have some capacity to heal themselves. Wellward can not only help you find the cause of your pain but also offer a variety of treatment options that will target your specific problems or injuries so you can find lasting pain relief. Contact us today to book a Pain Mapping appointment, or to ask any questions you may have about our process and how we can help you on your journey to a pain-free life.