The First Cause of Stress and Disease

Physical Pain or Discomfort (Trauma or repetitive strain)


Last article, I proposed that all diseases, conditions, and symptoms are the result of some form of stress overloading your body, and provided the four categories of stress.

The benefit to this line of thinking is that instead of trying to fit yourself into one of the 12,000 plus named conditions, you have four. And these four categories refer directly to the cause of the 12,000 plus named diseases, so whatever you want to call it, I would rather treat the cause.

This category begins with a straightforward assessment. Hmmm…that knee is dislocated, perhaps a cause of the pain…or was it the tree that he ran into?

I won’t even get into the blatantly obvious, and this is really more about figuring out causes for conditions that don’t present obviously. Most Fibromyalgia suffers didn’t run into a tree. So what did they run into.

Fibromyalgia is actually one of my focuses, as the “poster child disease” of “what the heck is going on here. “ And, fibromyalgia has an association to trauma. Often a whiplash injury, as in the case of my wife Sonya’s mother (You can read her story on my website under the fibromyalgia heading…click on the “personal message.”).

The even more subtle trauma to our bodies is the repetitive strain of work, play, and gravity. I often comment to my patients during our initial visit that they have a “BAD relationship with gravity!” I have a full length mirror in my exam room to show them the myriad of postural stressors that are STRESSFUL, every moment they are resisting the field of gravity. Sure, they are slight (and some not so slight), but if you walk around this way, stand around this way, for hours every day…month after month…year after year…something will give.

Think of that relative with scoliosis…don’t they suffer with chronic aches and pains. In severe scoliosis, the twisting and turning of the spine shifts the posture, and gravity becomes a major stressor…and always wins…if you have ever seen an elderly person crumpled up with scoliosis.

Most (all?) of us have more subtle postural shifts, perhaps resulting from poor arches in the feet, injuries and scars sustained during a lifetime, or simply deconditioning…a nice word for out of shape.

I use the old chiropractic analogy of holding a bowling ball. If you hold a bowling ball straight up over your elbow, it doesn’t strain your bicep…but if you stretch your arm out from the shoulder, the further you go, the more impossible it becomes to hold that ball up. It is a good analogy, because your head actually weighs about the same as your bowling ball.

And we wonder why we “hold our stress” in our backs or shoulders. That’s not your bosses fault, it is gravity whipping your butt.

I love these types of stresses, because, thanks to one of my greatest professors, Dr. Walter Schmitt, I have an awesome technique to correct these abnormal postures resulting from the accumulation of injuries over a lifetime.

He calls it Injury Recall Technique, and it is so simple, yet effective, it amazes and dazzles the patients I have used it on. Literally, in moments, pain can be relieved, postural shifts can change, that you can see and feel.

Unfortunately, most of my patients have one or more of the other categories of stress, that take a bit more time to shift away from or out of, so my “miracles” are few and far between.